Timothy Stoner

Flattening Crowns or Casting Them Down

Posted on 20. Apr, 2011 by Tim Stoner.

I wonder why we have such trouble taking the biblical depictions of heaven seriously. It seems to frighten and shame us somehow. Whether conceived as place or state, it is weightier and infinitely more substantial than ours. So we must fold, flatten and reshape it. Do we find it embarrassing because it exposes our smallness and lightness of being? Admittedly, it is too bright and too concentrated by far. After all, it is where saints live, and maybe this is why we dislike the shattering images, because it reminds us that that is precisely what we are not. But, there is hope that we still can be.

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Joy is the Meaning of Life

Posted on 17. Jun, 2009 by Tim Stoner.

The bottom line is not despair or dutiful struggle, or even battle against the powers–it is joy. And despite the idolatrous reduction of life to sex or death and, most currently, ironic despair, there is great ground for hope for as Peter Kreeft observes “decadently apocalyptic ages elicit saints. Suffering elicits courage, compassion, heroism, and martyrdom.”

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