Culture Making items tagged heaven

The epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets

2009-01-07T15:43:49Z

Nate: “A lovely passage on the here and hereafter from the novel that's currently (and belatedly, given the strength of my friends' recommendations) on my bedside table.”

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty to it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

from Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, 2004

“Red Clay Halo,” by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings

2009-01-07T15:43:49Z

Nate: “Here's a lovely riff on the notion that, come eternity, all creation—including the red earth formed during those geologic eras where there was dry land but no plants, causing the whole surface to oxidize to a rusty, Martian hue—will be redeemed. And that our own songs about dirt might find their place in heaven.”

"Red Clay Halo," by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, from the abum Time (The Revelator), preformed here in a BBC broadcast from St. Luke's in London, 2 August 2004

Stephen Colbert interviews N.T. Wright

2009-01-07T15:43:49Z

Nate: “Given the constraints of the interview -- super-short, and with against a man in character whose main goal is to be funny -- Wright holdes his own on Life After Heaven. It helps that both men are great wits and, in their way, know their stuff.”

The Colbert Report