Heaven

Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife

By: Lisa Miller

Narrated by: Linda Emond

Eighty percent of Americans say they believe in heaven, but very few of them are able to articulate anything specific about their belief, leaving only questions. Is heaven a real place? Is it a city or a garden or both? Can you keep your body there? If so, can you eat, drink, make love? Are you recognizable as yourself in heaven? Do your relationships continue there? Or is heaven something else? A radical idea? A disembodied, unconscious existence? A sense of progression toward perfect understanding, justice, beauty, truth?



Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians and scholars have dissected these questions—and others like them—for thousands of years, yet in today’s world, most people leave them pretty well alone, content to live with a shallow or incomplete sense of what they do believe. Award-winning journalist Lisa Miller dissects these ancient theologies and their different ideas regarding an afterlife by looking at what the beliefs are, how they have impacted one another, and also how they have reacted to the needs and lifestyles of their followers through the ages. By looking at profiles of real people and history, and analyzing conversations with scholars, Heaven forces people to grapple with their beliefs about heaven. It holds up a mirror to allow Americans to gauge how their ideas about heaven measure up to traditional and popular ideas throughout history in an accessible, palatable way.

Heaven: A Resource for Hopeful Living

Lisa Miller gives us readers an extremely entertaining, educative and vulnerable exploration into the plethora of views regarding heaven. She is a Reformed Jew and editor of Newsweek's religion section. Miller isn???t committed to a firm belief in Heaven but definitely manages to elicit our hopes for a meaningful life... and perhaps more. I haven???t read any treatment of heaven that is more conversationally readable than this book. With genuine interest and tolerance the author listens to a variety of view points concerning afterlife. She honestly admits that she wished she might have the same faith and confidence in heaven as some of her interviewees express. She seems particularly drawn to the ideas of heaven in orthodox Judaism and evangelicalism. I am not sure whether or not her hopes are crushed due to being a thoroughly postmodern person divorced from a the ancient world-views but she does seem to wish for the earlier literal belief in heaven, even though she is intellectually convinced of modern cosmology.

I felt as if I were receiving a wonderful review of all the comparative religion courses I have ever had while at college. The only difference was that she was thoroughly engaging and utilized testimony from individuals who believed ardently in their views of afterlife rather than mere theorists. She made me want to take the topic seriously and to explore how whatever the other side contains it has an importance to my here and now life.

Lisa Miller has definitely done a vast amount or research and recommends some of the best popular and academic treatments of her subject. I was delighted to see that she even spoke to and read N.T. Wright one of my favourite Christian theologians who stresses the importance of Resurrection rather than immortality in a bodiless other world. Like the author herself, Wright does all in his power to intricately connect the Heaven to Earth in a profoundly hopeful manner.

While tabulating the views of Heaven in the history of religions and current traditions, she doesn???t neglect to submit Heaven to the gaze of empirical science by discussing the various research on NDE (Near Death Experience) and physic phenomena. The age old dilemma of Mind/Brian connection is ever in the background. However, even when discussing the first hand accounts of dying and returning Lisa Miller emphasizes the need to apply a ethical litmus test as to whether the experience enhanced the character of the person having had it. From her examples it appears that the NDE experience regularly retrieves individuals from death to their normal consciousness with more love, generosity and confidence. Such transformation can not be easily dismissed.

Lisa Miller rarely takes sides in the debates on heaven, except in the case of exploiting the grieving through seances or by making the entry to Heaven a sectarian or ethnic privilege. She maintains an open mind throughout her book and ultimately displaces a gracious attitude toward different points of view. There is very little reductionism here nor is there any deriding of the beliefs of others. Love is Heaven???s watchword; Dante is its prime poet. Miller doesn???t evade the fact that heaven, when overly literalized and humanized, is jest-worthy as her comments on Albert Brooks??? 1991 film Defend Your Life reveal. In-between reincarnating Hassid Jews, Paradise pursuing Muslims and a host of others, the true North of Miller???s discussion is an affirmation of life. She exalts the importance of Heaven for the expectant living in her last paragraph,

I do not cling to heaven as a radical concept, a place that embodies the best of everything ??? but beyond the best. A belief in heaven focuses our minds on the radical nature of what???s beautiful, most loving, most just, and most true. At the beginning of this book, I said, I believed that heaven was hope. I would now amend that to say, ???Radical hope - a constant hope for unimaginable perfection even as we fail to achieve it. As Emily Dickinson said, heaven is what we cannot reach. But it is worth a human life to try.