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Aug 27, 2013

Living Church: Garrett Turns to the Afterlife

(livingchurch.org) - If popular culture shapes how 21st-century people understand the afterlife, then some literature and movies are more helpful — and truer to the Bible — than others. Perhaps a guide can help sift the wheat from the chaff.

 

Greg Garrett, 51, a licensed lay preacher in the Episcopal Church (at St. David's, Austin) and a professor of English at Baylor University, hopes to provide such guidance in Entertaining Judgment: The Afterlife in Literature and Culture.

 

The book, scheduled for 2014 by Oxford University Press, explores how popular ideas of heaven, hell, and purgatory are shaped by what we watch, what we read, and what we’ve derived from religious traditions.

 

“Most Christians hold many of their beliefs about the afterlife as much from art and literature as from Scripture and theology,” Garrett said via email.

 

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