Who is bartleby and loki

Challenge… reaching the gates of heaven. There are lots of people and deities who have a stake in whether Bartleby reaches heaven or not. Personality… self-righteous, disturbed, bitter. Bartleby has had enough of Wisconsin — eternity there is unbearable. He would rather unmake existence than live there for the rest of time. This desire makes him a loose cannon that can be set off quite easily. The latest battle in the eternal war between Good and Evil has come to New Jersey in the late, late 20th Century.

Angels, demons, apostles and prophets of a sort walk among the cynics and innocents of America and duke it out for the fate of humankind. No grown-up Catholic really thinks that angels literally have wings, or even bodies. By the same token, angels have no ability to "become" human, at least in reality.

Smith took the license of investing his fictional angels with literal wings — and the ability to cut them off and become human — simply because for plot reasons their scheme worked better if they could follow the normal human route for getting to heaven after receiving the indulgence. So far, so good. This is repeatedly stated to be a point of Catholic belief. They could even have baptized one another, if they had to.

Afterwards, if they lived long enough, there would be plenty of time to think about indulgences. For the record, what indulgences offer is not forgiveness of sins, but remission of temporal penalties due to sins that have already been forgiven. They are concerned not with eternal punishment, but with temporal consequences.

Of course, Loki and Bartleby may not have been the brightest angels in the heavens. Even Metatron, the "herald of God," introduces himself as "a seraphim, the highest choir of angel. It would explain a lot. God has decreed that the two angels would never return to heaven. If the angels succeed, God would be proved wrong. Now, the bits about the angel speaking for God, and God wanting Bethany to stop the angels instead of doing it himself, are actually kind of interesting theologically.

They suggest the principle of divine agency, the idea that God often delegates to creatures what he could certainly do for himself, in order to involve and ennoble his creatures. Too bad it turns out not to be the case, at least with respect to Bethany. EC: From a scholarly point of view, the Bible is a fragmentary record that was written by various religious communities to preserve stories about their shared pasts.

Some of the texts in the Bible were also written with the explicit goal of persuading their audiences to accept a particular point of view. Needless to say, the collection of texts in the Bible is a partial picture of the full historical past. The Bible does not include, for example, all of the voices that were heard in the early generations of the church, especially the voices of women. What we have is an edited, filtered version. Is there any evidence in scripture that Jesus had an extended family?

EC: There is a complicated history behind this discussion. In the canonical gospels, there is a passage in which Mary the mother of Jesus and Jesus' siblings come looking for him.

When he hears that they are outside asking for him, Jesus responds by saying, "Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother. It is only when the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity emerges that this passage, if read literally, becomes a problem. Later interpreters deal with the problem by making different arguments. Among these is the argument that Joseph had been married before and so Jesus' siblings were actually his stepbrothers and stepsisters.

But there is no scriptural basis for this claim. MF: Do any of the gospels dispute the fact that Mary was a virgin and remained so after the birth of Jesus? EC: The gospel of Mark does not mention the birth of Jesus at all, so we must assume that the writer of this gospel knew no tradition of an unusual birth. The gospels of Matthew and Luke handle the scandal of the unwed Mary's pregnancy in different ways.

It is unclear from the texts themselves what meanings they attribute to Mary's virginity. Certainly neither text claims Mary remained a virgin forever. The earliest reference to Mary continuing to be a virgin may be found in an apocryphal gospel from the middle of the 2nd or the early part of the 3rd century called The Protoevangelium of James.

This text, which was not included in the Bible, contends that Mary remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus. Church fathers in the 3rd and 4th centuries argued over the point, and it wasn't until the 5th century that this became orthodox teaching. EC: The United States has a long history of anti-Catholicism, and a dimension of this prejudice includes a fear of Vatican secrecy.

I believe this fear has to do with the fact that, indeed, the Catholic Church's structures of authority and hierarchy do not align with American democratic values.

As the bishops and cardinals remind us constantly, the church is not a democratic institution. Consequently, there will be those who view the church hierarchy as a secretive, even conspiratorial structure. But I think this sort of fear exists around other forms of institutional authority as well, including the U. When I teach about Catholicism, I try to stress that the institutional church is only one aspect of what it means to be Catholic and that the idealized monolith of the church is belied by the wide and vibrant diversity of Catholics themselves.