The video for the song presents the idea of moving from an unsatisfactory reality to-or back to-a place of beauty and joy. At several points, the song offers only “ooos” and soaring “Ohs,” since no words can properly capture the ineffable reality of the world beyond. Maybe no single page of my book could reveal the way I’m developing arguments about Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and our current fascination with the undead, but does at least show you the breadth of the texts I’m exploring to do it, and that makes it a snapshot worth keeping.įrom page 99: The lyrics however, can take us only part of the way to Paradise. I do love me some Ford Madox Ford, and it turns out he’s mostly right about how the project applies to Entertaining Judgment. Then I jump into another archetype of Heaven, “Elysium,” opening with this beautiful quotation from Homer’s The Odyssey and moving on to Shakespeare, Mozart, Tolkien, and the movies Gladiator and (natch) Elysium. finds us at the end of a section exploring the heavenly archetype “Paradise.” On previous pages, I’ve been discussing how the idea of a place of joy and beauty distinct from our current existence gets developed in texts from The Grapes of Wrath to the cult classic Big Night (set in a failing restaurant called “Paradise”) to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.Īs the page opens, I’m finishing a close reading of Coldplay’s Grammy-nominated song “Paradise” and its bizarre but charming music video.

In this particular photo, let’s imagine that you see parts of two bodies. gives you a nice snapshot of the larger book, which takes on huge concepts by analyzing specific presentations of these abstract ideas across the centuries. In the chapter as a whole, I’m discussing literature, music, movies, art, and other forms of culture-as well as Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim holy texts-to see how human beings have tried to envision a positive form of afterlife. is smack in the middle of my chapter on human imaginings of Heaven. Entertaining Judgment argues that much of what we know or think we know about death (and what follows) is a product of the human imagination. Garrett applied the “ Test” to Entertaining Judgment and reported the following: This turns out to be a useful exercise: of Entertaining Judgment actually offers a pretty representative picture of what the book is trying to accomplish. His latest book is Entertaining Judgment: The Afterlife in Popular Imagination, which explores the stories we tell about death and the afterlife-and why we tell them.īBC Radio has called Garrett 'one of America's leading voices on religion and culture,' and he has also written on such topics as spirituality and suffering, film, U2, Harry Potter, and the boom in superhero narratives. Greg Garrett, the 2013 Centennial Professor at Baylor University, is the author of twenty books of nonfiction, memoir, and fiction.

Holy Superheroes! by Greg Garrett