Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The Mind Is Its Own Place



"The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."
Satan attempting to make the best of a situation in John Milton's Paradise Lost

I'd like to register a degree of pleasure concerning the conversations I've personally witnessed as well as the ones I envision taking place as a direct result of the Rob Bell's new book, marketing campaign, and iPhone/iPad app (none of these easily extricated from one another). I spent about two seconds wondering if the text is well-served by having a hard copy at all, but quickly concluded that there has to be one if it's to go really viral. We like carrying these things around. Strangers in airports or coffeeshops might ask us a question or something.
I bring Tom Waits and Modest Mouse into the conversation (not that they weren't already there) with my own appreciative reading here.

4 comments:

jmw said...

Hmmm:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/25/opinion/25douthat.html?_r=2

Sweet Lily said...

Wow, cool!

Mark said...

“We need a loaded, volatile, adequately violent, dramatic, serious word to describe the very real consequences we experience when we reject the good and true and beautiful life that God has for us. We need a word that refers to the big, wide, terrible evil that comes from the secrets hidden deep within our hearts all the way to the massive, society-wide collapse and chaos that comes when we fail to live in God’s world God’s way.”

Justice?

Mark said...

Try again...

The authors definition of hell requires faith which would seem to exclude the very people for whom it is reserved. Consequence, which follows every action, requires no faith and is therefore in the domain of fact. To suffer consequences is Justice, not hell.