Books, Arts & Manners: Crossing the Horizon

Eternal Life? Life after Death as a Medical, Philosophical, and Theological Problem, by Hans Küng (Doubleday, 270 pp., $15.95)

It has been four years now since Pope John Paul II saw to the revocation of Hans Küng’s license to teach as an official Catholic theologian. At the time, the move afforded brief satisfaction to the orthodox, who greeted it as a sadly needed certification of the obvious. But it has also provided Küng with another of the self-dramatizing metaphors that have fuelled his immense popularity. Lately he has taken to depicting himself as a renegade sleuth, a seeker after transcendental clues, always several steps ahead of the hidebound officials who approve only well-worn investigative paths. Still, anyone hoping for a clear-cut case had better stick with the cops—at least if this book is a fair record of the evidence its author thinks he has found.

ML

About the Author

Michael Liccione

Featured Tags

Eternal Life? Life after Death as a Medical, Philosophical, and Theological Problem, by Hans Küng (Doubleday, 270 pp., $15.95)

It has been four years now since Pope John Paul II saw to the revocation of Hans Küng’s license to teach as an official Catholic theologian. At the time, the move afforded brief satisfaction to the orthodox, who greeted it as a sadly needed certification of the obvious. But it has also provided Küng with another of the self-dramatizing metaphors that have fuelled his immense popularity. Lately he has taken to depicting himself as a renegade sleuth, a seeker after transcendental clues, always several steps ahead of the hidebound officials who approve only well-worn investigative paths. Still, anyone hoping for a clear-cut case had better stick with the cops—at least if this book is a fair record of the evidence its author thinks he has found.