Mandate of Heaven

One of the misconceptions about hell that Sartre touches upon in No Exit is that it is typically imagined as a place of pitchforks and fire – a place based more on physical torture than mental. In the case of Sartre’s hell, Garcin suffers a hell that is mostly psychological, with Inez and Estelle being the sources of his torment. In my opinion, these are the two forms of hell that could exist – physical and psychological torment. One of them provides a tangible feeling that a person suffers and…

I often used to focus so much on myself when I shared my testimony, but over the past year I started to question why I did this. Over the years I have come to learn that my testimony is not about myself, but rather it testifies about the love, power and grace of the One who saved me, Jesus Christ. My salvation is fully reliant on Jesus and nothing I have done. I was raised by two Christian parents, who deeply love the Lord. This was truly a blessing in my life, as I was exposed to the Bible and…

Through their works, American poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson comment on the mysteries of life and the end result of death. In a combination between the words “death” and “brain,” in the poems “Because I Could Not Stop For Death,” and “The Brain – Is Wider Than The Sky,” Dickinson attempts to show the reader the numerous possibilities of life. Walt Whitman, in the poems “Song of Myself,” and “Leaves of Grass”, tries to combine the words death and grass in an attempt to explain how to cope…

Ameneh Mustafa Sazama American Literature 24 September 2014 “We are all infected & impure with sin. When we display our righteous deed, they are nothing, but filthy rags. Like autumn leaves, we wither and fall, and our sins sweep us away like the wind”. This verse from the Bible says that when sin is committed it brings nothing but unsatisfactory. Throughout “the Scarlet Letter”, Hawthorne puts in many major symbols in his novel to convey a positive message to his readers,…

Once again, as in “Friday”, and as in Catholic devotional tradition, these failures are the “daily wounding” that continues to nail Christ to the “eternal Cross” of the poem’s title. In one of Jennings’ early collections, Song for a Birth or Death a sequence of poems entitled “The Clown”, the circus clown becomes a clear image of the crucified Christ. The similarity is apparent in a variety of terms that include innocence “you seem like one not fallen from grace”, “helplessness” and the…

Like hell, purgatory also has a structure in which each level focuses on a different sin. Unlike hell, sinners in purgatory work their way up through the seven terraces of purgatory in order to finally reach heaven. To advance to a new terrace, sinners must first work off the sins from the previous terraces. In each terrace, sinners face a unique punishment that they must endure until God is satisfied. Of this process, Dante writes, "God demands we pay the debt…

Zechariah’s visions begin with the sight of a horseman standing between two myrtle trees in a valley. Behind him were three horses of different color. When interpreted, the horseman is identified as the angel of the Lord, and the other horses are angels that search the earth. The discovery of these angels points to the purpose of the vision: the world was at peace because of God, and He would now utilize this peace to restore His people to a state of blessedness. Following a promise of…

painting is based on the poem Dante's Divine Comedy. In the poem Dante's Divine Comedy, Dante travels through all three planes of the afterlife. He goes to hell, heaven and purgatory. This fresco illustrates the story behind the poem. This canvas is divided into thirds. Each third allows us to see the artists interpretation of heaven, hell, and purgatory. This represents the three categories of cantos. In the middle of all of these places stands Dante himself. Dante is wearing a faded red robe…

for anxiety to prevent NDE or predeath visions. Dr. Morse was able to locate a few cases that dealt with predeath visions, and revealed that patients who have predeath visions are not suffering from the visions but are having beautiful visions of heaven and Jesus according to the cases he…

It is evident that Augustine and Dante are much like many authors as they too explore spirituality in their writings. Augustine’s book Confessions and Dante’s Purgatorio both see humans as pilgrims on a journey that either brings them to God or away from God. These books have challenged readers, like myself, as they draw insight from them to apply to their own spiritual journey. In these books there are many themes that apply to Augustine and Dante’s spiritual journey. The theme that I am…