All This, and Heaven Too
A Guide for All Souls
- Theology
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2024
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Publisher's Description
This book offers an intelligent but accessible recovery of the Christian hope for heaven and the resurrected life. Our ideas of heaven often need rescuing from the well-meaning but often empty sense of a "better-place." It is more fruitful, the author argues, to orientate ourselves by St. Paul's words: "For this world is not our permanent home; we are looking forward to a home yet to come." Each of us desires Eden while struggling to make good out of evil. The things we cherish have their goodness diluted and drained of life. Through it all, we cannot quite picture heaven and our eternal happiness. It feels remote and unreal. Yet the recovery of paradise in our hearts and minds is the crucial act of our lives. Through it we can understand the meaning behind the greatest commandment: "Love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind."
Endorsements (4)
“Caitlin Smith Gilson has much to teach us about heaven, not as a seer or as a prophet of things to come, but as a poet, a philosopher, indeed as a believer, who stays on this side of the veil and longs for all that awaits on the other side. Smith Gilson’s desire for the eschaton, though deeply sensitive to human tragedy, is never world-weary, but superbly guides us to see all those places where the veil is translucent to divine glory.”
“This amazing book addresses the truly important issues: death, heaven, resurrection, forgiveness, judgment. The heart of the book asks what the resurrected state will be like, not in a rationalistic way but with enough force to awaken our yearning for resurrection and eternal life. With beautiful art by Carol Scott, this book reveals Smith Gilson to be the rarest of modern theologians, one who writes for everyone and does so not only as theologian, but mystic.”
“This volume continues Caitlin Smith Gilson’s extraordinary fruitful collaboration with the artist Carol Scott as it revisits one of Smith Gilson’s themes, that is, our ache for heaven, which is as much an ache for the fullness of life as the afterlife, a judgment of what truly is as it is a hope for what we have been given only in flashes. Smith Gilson and Scott sing the glories of the resurrected body in ecstasy and communion as the perfection of creation made possible through the resurrection of Christ who is eternal life. This is a book of great intellectual depth, Christian clarity, and spiritual penetration.”
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