Bibliograph

A Very Brief History of Eternity, Carlos Eire

Type

Label

A Very Brief History of Eternity, Carlos Eire

Language

eng

Index

no index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

A Very Brief History of Eternity

Medium

electronic resource

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Responsibility statement

Carlos Eire

Summary

What is eternity? Is it anything other than a purely abstract concept, totally unrelated to our lives? A mere hope? A frightfully uncertain horizon? Or is it a certainty, shared by priest and scientist alike, and an essential element in all human relations? In A Very Brief History of Eternity, Carlos Eire, the historian and National Book Award-winning author of Waiting for Snow in Havana, has written a brilliant history of eternity in Western culture. Tracing the idea from ancient times to the present, Eire examines the rise and fall of five different conceptions of eternity, exploring how they developed and how they have helped shape individual and collective self-understanding. A book about lived beliefs and their relationship to social and political realities, A Very Brief History of Eternity is also about unbelief, and the tangled and often rancorous relation between faith and reason. Its subject is the largest subject of all, one that has taxed minds great and small for centuries, and will forever be of human interest, intellectually, spiritually, and viscerally

Target audience

adult

Classification