The Sweet Hereafter: A Fabulous Novel

The novel “End of Days” by Eric Walters starts off with a Soviet satellite’s travels. It first traveled to Jupiter and eventually left our solar system. The satellite reached a huge asteroid with the diameter of 500 kilometers roughly 1/6 the diameter of the moon. The satellite orbited the asteroid, just by accident the satellite’s messages were received on earth. Those messages revealed that the satellite was on its way home and the asteroid was coming with it. If it hit earth all of life on earth cease, if it missed then the earth would be pushed too close to the sun and life would never be able to survive on Earth again. An organization called the International Aerospace Research Institute planned to use the nuclear weapons of every nuclear-capable

Salvation describes the deliverance by God for those who believe in him. It is the saving of the soul from sin (and its consequences) through Gods will and grace. Though it takes different forms in every religion, the principle is still the same, often emphasising the necessity of both good works, repentance, and asceticism, as well as divine intervention (in this case the action being the grace of God). If assuming that Christ is the full truth, then the only way to gain access to God after death is through the salvation given by the Christian God. Jesus himself has indicated that a person must hear the word, believe it, repent of past sins, and be willing to confess faith before others, be baptized into Christ for the remission of sins, and then continue to live a faithful life throughout this physical life if we are to go to heaven.

Imagine a town, a town that is devoid of any warmth and hospitality. It merely stands as a collection of apartments, houses, stores, restaurants, roads; a plethora of buildings all laid out in meticulous detail for a royal return that will never come. Large, vibrant red slogans with painted with the words “SALE,” only to be read by the dusty, stale wind. If you look up, you see a bicycle, a fine layer of dust slowly inching its way over the bike, chained to a rack, waiting for its owner to never return. Beyond the once-busy market is the town’s clock tower, frozen at quarter past four. Is this what our amazing God created this world for? Is this the meaning of every human life? Is the purpose of life for a lively town to be stripped of its skeleton of civilians, to be reduced

Suddenly losing his eyesight at a young age and having to deal with living in a whole new world, Marcus Engel tells his story of how he coped with losing his eyesight. Marcus Engel described his hardships and struggles after he became blind in his book, After This…An Inspirational Journey for All the Wrong Reasons. The book begins with Engel mentioning his college life and how he was excited to be going back home for vacation. While he was with his friends he got into a bad car accident that left him blind. The rest of the book tells his emotional life changing story of how he learned to accept his blindness and to do daily tasks. In his stay at the hospital he made a goal to get back to college.

Chapter three of Eyal Press’ Beautiful Souls follows Avner Wishnitzer, an Israeli combat soldier serving in the occupied territories during the Second Intifada. In the 6-Day War of 1967, Israel captured the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and has since kept the land under an Israeli military occupation. In 1987 to 1991, a Palestinian uprising involving resistance and civil disobedience, known as the First Intifada, occurred in the occupied territories. Consequently, Israel deployed many soldiers into the occupied territories, and an estimated 1,674 people were killed in total. The Second Intifada, a much more violent Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories, transpired from 2000 until 2005. In response, Israel enacted Operation Defensive Shield, a large-scale military operation, in 2002 to stop the terrorist attacks and suicide bombings of the Second Intifada. An approximate 4,426 people were killed in the Second Intifada. Avner Wishnitzer’s public refusal to serve in the occupied territories was worth getting kicked out of Sayeret Matkal and being disgraced by Israeli society because it made people question the occupation and the treatment towards Palestinians. Even if Avner had been my father, I would have condoned his choices because I could create my own reputation in the military. Additionally, the current controversy over the Israeli occupation legitimizes his stance and actions for many Israeli citizens.

The novel Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina is a fictionalized tale of the conflict that took place in the coal fields of West Virginia. The novel brings to light the stereotypes, race and religion of the Appalachian people. In this paper I’d like to briefly discuss Denise Giardina’s life, her novel Storming Heaven and some of the issues that arise within the storyline of the text.

The book Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, is a non-fiction work by Mary Roach, that explores the unanswered questions about the afterlife. The humorous and scientific exploration includes: whether there is a soul that survives death, reincarnation, near-death experiences and out of body experiences. This is a book about what scientists are doing and have done in their attempt to find evidence that when we die we don’t just turn into bones. Roach attempts to find and the define that soul using a scientific approach in order to determine the possibilities of an afterlife. To achieve this goal, she examines what scientists have discovered in their quest to find evidence for life after death.

Many opposed this event by turning to Monasticism, these people wanted to devote their lives to God, but despite of all of this Weisser notes that Oneness still exist.

I could feel the terror at the beginning of the poem “A Fig for Thee, Oh! Death” by Edward Taylor. He mentions falling in a pit of darkness that masks me feel that he fears death or that he is looking into the face of death. He continues talking about the lords blessing and how he’s missing it which I feel like he’s speaking about God’s forgiveness for his sins and evil doing. When he speaks about how his skin feels like a shell and how God is breaking into it, I feel like he’s talking about how he feels and how he’s vulnerable about everything that he’s feeling about in his life and how he’s so scared to breakdown in an emotional state in the face of God. However, I feel that he believed that when you die, you must face your sins and that

All Souls, written by Michael Patrick MacDonald, is the story of a low-income family from Boston that ends up moving from the projects in Columbia Point to the projects South Boston, also known as Southie. From then, the book focuses on the MacDonald family and their lives in 1960’s South Boston and in particular the crime, violence and corruption that existed within South Boston but most importantly, how it was that the MacDonald family viewed Southie and how those views changed overtime. On the first page of the book, Michael Patrick MacDonald starts of by recalls his mother at one point calling Southie, “The Best Place in the World” (MacDonald 1). The comparison from Ma calling Southie the best place in the world compared to a couple of pages ahead where she says that she’d “Never come back to this hell hole of a fucking neighborhood ever again” (MacDonald 15). This change of mentality of not only Ma, but the rest of the family, especially Michael Patrick MacDonald, is categorized within C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination. In The Sociological Imagination, Mills speaks on two ways of thinking that are very prevalent in MacDonald’s All Souls. According to Mills’ there is an “ordinary” way of thinking and a then there is having a “sociological imagination”. In All Souls, both of these different mindsets are portrayed thru the MacDonald family as well as within their community of Old Colony. All Souls tells the story of a community suffering from the “ordinary” way of thinking and what kind of negative outcomes their fixed mindset.

The Terrible Things is an allegory to the holocaust by Eve Bunting. This allegory is comparable to First they came for the communists, and the excerpt from Elie Wiesel’s Night in the sense of that they all convey a message of how ignoring people who are trying to warn you, or just not doing anything to warn or help other people/creatures, will eventually get you all taken away in the holocaust. Throughout the story, not one animal speaks out, or tries to help another creature when they are being taken away. Little rabbit constantly asks why a certain creature was taken away. Big rabbit simply replies, “The Terrible Things don’t need a reason. Just be glad it wasn't us they wanted” (Bunting 1). Eventually, there are no creatures left in the

Social change comes from a societies understanding and acceptance of controversial topics, laws that enforce social norms and the politics that play a role in such change. The author Gerald Rosenberg of “The Hollow Hope” believes that the Supreme Court is able to bring about social change. Rosenburg main argument seemed to be questioning if a courts ruling that had once been accepted and had standing for several years were to be over turned, would the environment outside of the courtroom suddenly change and be accepting of their division.

“Imagine there’s No Heaven” is a letter written by Salman Rushdie who is a British Indian novelist and essayist. He is an atheist and is known for his unflinching criticism of religion. Rushdie contributed this letter to a UN-sponsored anthology, addressed to the six-billionth human child who was expected to be born that year. He attempts to discuss and answer two fundamental questions of life. “How did we get here? And, now that we are here, how shall we live?” However he diverts from his central thesis and most of his text malign and smear all religions while the two questions go almost completely unanswered. His tone is demeaning, scornful and he presents religious beliefs as being ridiculous. He makes absolute statements without any

The short story "Hell-Heaven" written by Jhumpa Lahiri, is about the clashing of the cultures of a Bengali family settling in the west. While story is told in the child's point of view as she matures to a young woman, we're also given the experiences of the people around her through her eyes. These people include her mother, father and a family friend. They each have a different experience as an immigrant migrating and living in America, which leaves us to wonder what message is the author trying to convey with this piece of literature. However, the message to come from "Hell-Heaven" Jhumpa Lahiri is that immigrant families face struggles and tribulations living in unfamiliar territory and having to choose one culture over another.

1.          Upon entering the bar for the first time, Frank displays many of the motivational theories listed in the book. Frank enters the bar in order to find a place for his homosexual preferences to be shown. Instinctually he prefers men to women and is driven into the dark alley and the bar by this biologically determined need. We learn from his wife’s reaction when the girls are having daiquiris that she and Frank are not having sex very often which according to the book is a basic need, so Frank according to the drive-reduction approach is driven to the bar to fulfil himself. This lack of sex that he is having at home also can lead to the application of the Arousal approach to motivation where Frank is trying