A New Heaven - Paperback Edition

Overview

*Nautilus Award Winner*

*Catholic Media Association Award Winner*

“A book, with the legendary Harvey Cox wisdom on full display, eloquently written to change the way people think and believe, live and die.”—James Carroll, author, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie

“What a wonderful book this is. It shows how a restless mind is compatible with a spirit at peace.” —E. J. Dionne Jr., author, Our Divided Political Heart

“This book is an adventure to read. Do not be deceived into thinking that it is a meditation on death or the afterlife, for it is really a felicitous exploration of the meaning of life.”—Arvind Sharma, editor, Religion in a Secular City: Essays in Honor of Harvey Cox

“A sweeping theological journey guided by one of today’s wisest and most seasoned thinkers. Now in his 90s, Harvey Cox takes us through various vistas of heaven and we learn a lot about ourselves along the way. To those focused on ‘going to heaven,’ Cox offers a more biblical and powerful social vision of a ‘new heaven,’ the Kingdom of God, a reign of love and justice, both present and yet coming into reality.”—Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion and Indian studies, Harvard University

Harvey Cox is one of America’s great public theologians of the past fifty years. In many bestselling books he has written on matters of religion and faith for a popular audience, including on secularism and belief, world religions, Jewish-Christian dialogue, liberation theology, Pentecostalism, Jesus, and biblical interpretation. In his new book he explores the question that underlies all religion: what is the point of life that ends in death? What are the different ways we think about the afterlife? What are we actually talking about when we talk about heaven?

Interestingly, this is not a subject of great preoccupation in the Gospels. Jesus was concerned primarily with the Kingdom of God—about conforming the present world to the values and principles of God’s love and justice. How this has gravitated toward concern with “life after death” is one of the topics covered here. Cox draws on personal stories, including his youthful work as an assistant his uncle, an undertaker, approaches to death in other cultures and religions; and his own reflections on mortality.

Harvey Cox (b. 1929), is an ordained minister in the American Baptist Church. He served for many years as Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School until his retirement in 2009. Beginning with his bestselling The Secular City (1965), he has written over a dozen books, most recently, How to Read the Bible (Harper, 2015) and The Market as God (Harvard, 2016). In 2016 we published A Harvey Cox Reader.

Cover art: Based on a famous wood engraving of unknown origins known as the Flammarian engraving for its appearance in a 19^th century book by the French astronomer Camille Flammarian.

Cover design: Michael Calvente