I think I've mentioned before that I often end up writing up Stephen's guest first. No idea why -- unless it's that since his guests usually interest me more, I jump to them first. Dessert as an appetizer, right? So I'm posting in the order I wrote these in tonight. 'Cause.
Stephen's guest is Religion journalist Lisa Miller, currently at the Washington Post and Newsweek (once upon a time, she covered religion for WSJ, too). And she's the author of Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With The Afterlife." Which is what she's here to talk about. Sigh. I'm beyond bored with the religion thing...
Well, let's see what the reviews say. B&N has a bunch: here's the Publisher's Weekly review :
Heaven. The word evokes all kinds of images and feelings in the hearts of people virtually everywhere. In some corners, heaven is seen as a vague sense of euphoria, a state of everlasting bliss. In other corners, heaven is a busy place, where eternal progression is the challenge of eternity. In this fine work, Miller, religion editor for Newsweek, surveys this fascinating subject ...Beneath her pleasing prose and often amusing observations about the afterlife, there is a longing, a desire to be part of what heaven really is. And it is this sense of personal yearning that informs her delightful and insightful study. Heaven is hope...This marvelous work is a readable and wonderfully realized study of this constant hope that we share...will delight and edify readers at every level.
Gaaaah! Sounds like that reviewer liked the book, but -- GAAAAAH!
Library Journal, also at B&N, has this:
Miller (religion editor, Newsweek) offers a sample of the myriad views of heaven held by Americans today, as well as surveying the inspiration for those views...She casts a wide net for her interview subjects...She presents us with the historical thought and writings as well as pop culture sources that are the basis of various current understandings of heaven...Like the stories of many people today, Miller's own religious story is complex; throughout the text, she interweaves her personal struggle with the idea of heaven. VERDICT Miller's potpourri ... should prove interesting to any general reader who has ever wondered about the great beyond. All of this will already be familiar to specialists.
That's better. Just tell me about the book, all right? And here's Kirkus:
An introduction to what monotheists of all stripes believe about heaven. Newsweek society and religion editor Miller offers an overview that combines elements of journalism, academics and memoir. Her approach provides an intriguing glimpse at what many believe the afterlife holds, though the author's own discomfort with the idea of heaven occasionally weighs down the ethereal subject matter. Her continued personal separation from the subject is meant to point out the widespread uncertainty about heaven, but in a book about those who believe, the author's distance becomes tiresome. Nonetheless, Miller does an exemplary job covering all monotheistic faiths...Populist approach by an elite, but a good starting point.
Hmm. So I guess if you like that kind of thing, you'll like it. Amazon has an assortment of customer reviews, should you care, and the bare-bones Booklist:
According to various polls, most Americans believe in heaven even, as Miller points out, when they don’t know what heaven means. Miller, Newsweek’s religion editor, addresses what and where heaven is and why the concept endures. Having covered many aspects of religion and interviewed people of many different faiths, she offers portraits of famous and ordinary people as well as experts in religious studies to educe how their views do or, more commonly, do not reflect the "official teaching, whatever that is." The crux of the book focuses on believers, not beliefs, "for how people imagine heaven changes with who they are and how they live." Miller discusses the heavenly city, afterlife in the Hebrew Bible, resurrection, and salvation, includes a chapter on visionaries, and comments extensively on how heaven is portrayed in pop culture ranging from the Talking Heads’ song "Heaven" to Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002). Miller’s whirlwind tour of heaven is an entertaining primer on a most complex subject.
Shoulda stuck with that.
Miller's site has brief quotes (with links) from some other reviews (looks more-or-less complete, from what Google tells me). Here are some bits she left out: From Slate:
When she is tracking the history of these ideas, Miller is highly competent (if rarely more). But she also interweaves a travelogue across America, during which she interviews believers in heaven—and here the book becomes insufferable. She describes herself as a "professional skeptic," but she is, in fact, professionally credulous. Instead of trying to tease out what these fantasies of an afterlife reveal about her interviewees, she quizzes everyone about their heaven as if she is planning to write a Lonely Planet guide to the area, demanding more and more intricate details. She only just stops short of demanding to know what the carpeting will be like. But she never asks the most basic questions: Where's your evidence? Where are you getting these ideas from?
She gives plenty of proof that the idea of heaven can be comforting, or beautiful—but that doesn't make it true. The difference between wishful thinking and fact-seeking is something most 6-year-olds can grasp, yet Miller—and, it seems, the heaven-believing majority—refuse it here. Yes, I would like to see my dead friends and relatives again. I also would like there to be world peace, a million dollars in my checking account, and for Matt Damon to ask me to marry him. If I took my longing as proof they were going to happen, you'd think I was deranged.
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"Rationalist questions are not helpful," announces one of her interviewees—a professor at Harvard, no less. This seems to be Miller's view too. She stresses that to believe in heaven you have to make "a leap of faith"—but in what other field in life do we abandon all need for evidence? Why do it in one so crucial to your whole sense of existence? And if you are going to "leap" beyond proof, why leap to the Christian heaven? Why not convince yourself you are going to live after death in Narnia, or Middle Earth, for which there is as much evidence? She doesn't explain: Her arguments dissolve into a feel-good New Age drizzle.
And here's the NYTimes:
Provoked by Miller to examine my own beliefs, I discovered that my heaven is a mix of "Dog Heaven" and a song I’ve lately been playing on my iPod, "When I Go Away," by Levon Helm: "All my kin who love me / All my friends who care / . . . We’re gonna meet up there." My time on earth is Jewish, but I expect afterlife in a children’s book, with a soundtrack by Bob Dylan’s old drummer.
Miller is Newsweek’s religion editor, and "Heaven" is a book of journalism, for better and for worse...
And too often, "Heaven" reads like a magazine article on repeat. By the end, I had invented a drinking game: do a shot every time Miller describes the interviewee’s eyes, two shots for the weather, three shots for the meal. The Harvard professor Jon Levenson’s "dark eyes twinkled" as he discussed his efforts to bring belief in bodily resurrection back to mainstream Judaism, while the eyes of Robert Hollander, a translator of the "Paradiso," "are alight with intelligence and love." Miller meets Ena Heller, a specialist in early Renaissance art, "over coffee one morning," and talks to Barbara and Warren Perry, an evangelical couple facing Warren’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, while eating "a lunch of turkey soup and melted cheese sandwiches." Miller and the Dante scholar Peter Hawkins drank wine "as the sun set over his balcony." I could go on, but the sky is blue outside, and I am drinking a mocha.
Miller has a hopeful view of religion, and of heaven. Her preference for progressive views is most evident in her treatment of Islam. She gives far more space to moderates who interpret the Koran liberally than to the fundamentalists who are moved — sometimes to violent suicide — by the promise of being serviced by dozens of dark-eyed virgins. Khaled Abou El Fadl, for example, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, is a brilliant and important progressive who tells Miller that his vision of heaven includes "accountability." But he is a minority figure in Islam.
Miller knows this, but she is not interested in the more dangerous thinkers, which is too bad. I would have appreciated a more cautionary tone: heaven can be a weapon, not just a consolation. But then again, I expect to see my dog in heaven, so this book is definitely for me.
OK then. Well, for those of you who care, enjoy. I've got something else to watch:
And the close-up:
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