Tag: religion

Let Your Light Shine

Timothy Price4 Comments

SunOverBuilding

I’m listening to a course on the history of Christian theology, and the last lecture I listened to was on how Christians came to the idea of the soul separating from the body and going to Heaven or Hell when they die. Believe it or not, the idea of the soul going to heaven when one dies is not in the least bit Christian in origin, or even Jewish for that matter, but purely from Plato. If you stick by the Christian tradition, Christ returns to establish God’s Kingdom on earth and resurrects those Christians who are saved to be part of the Kingdom of God on earth. So why is the idea that our souls go to Heaven or Hell when we die so prevalent in the Western Christian tradition? Mostly because Augustine was well versed in Plato and liked the idea of a separate body and soul, but he still believed there had to be the resurrection of the body before the soul could achieve complete happiness. One problem is that Paul and the other New Testament writers believed Jesus would return in their life-time, so there was no problem about what happened when a Christian died, but as time wore on, later Christians became anxious about what happens when they die. In a simplistic way of looking at a very complex and drawn out issue, Plato had the easy answer — good souls go to Heaven and bad souls go to Hell — but then there are the questionable souls, that, again because of Augustine, are believed to end up in purgatory, at least in the Catholic tradition!

Father Justin

Timothy PriceLeave a comment

We went to a lecture by Father Justin of St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai last night as part of the Medieval Studies lecture series. Father Justin is the Librarian at St. Catherine’s Monastery, which was built by Justinian in the sixth century, and is the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery in the world. His talk was on “Continuity and Change at Sinai from the Seventh to the Ninth Century: Insights from a Sinai Palimpsest.”  The palimpsest is a page from a set of manuscripts of the Epistles of St. Paul written in Greek with accompanying, parallel Arabic text from the 9th century. The manuscripts were left or forgotten in a room in the monastery where the roof collapsed and buried them. They were discovered in 1975 during renovations to the room. The manuscripts provide a great deal of information about the time when the Christian church in the Middle East was having to deal with the Islamic presence. Using modern photographic and digital technology, Father Justin has been able to not only study the writing that is currently on the manuscripts, but also enhance and make earlier text that had been erased legible so the previous writings can now be analyzed and studied, as well.

As we walked back to the car, I took a few photos of the buildings and features on campus. The architecture and lighting on UNM’s campus provide so many photo opts that I can’t recall setting foot on campus at night within the past four years without taking at least a half a dozen pictures.