Overview

Set against the backdrop of a dystopian, techno-driven future, The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster follows the life of an archbishop as he awaits his execution. Uniquely structured as a collection of letters, this fictional work leads the reader in discerning the general contours of the events that took place over the last several years of the Archbishop's life, including his imprisonment, trial, and eventual sentence. The Archbishop's correspondence, including his so-called ""posthumous"" letters, presents his meditations on embodiment, death, and the nature of reality. The Body of This Death invites the reader to enter the labyrinth of the Archbishop's thoughts as he anticipates his ever-approaching martyrdom.

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9781685782597

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Reviews

Ross McCullough's The Body of This Death is at once a pleasure to read and a stimulus to thought. It's a collection of theological and pastoral letters to various interlocutors from an imagined last Archbishop of Lancaster at some time in the near future. We read only the bishop's side of the correspondence, and he writes aphoristically, even gnomically. Much is therefore left open and underdetermined: the bishop is himself unreliable, sometimes wrong, aware of his own fallibility; but the letters are about what matters--progress, immersive virtual realities, the body, death, sainthood, grief, loss, error, the sacramental, the beautiful, the Church, the world, distraction, Islam, love--and so in reading them with attention we're moved toward engagement with these topics in their depth and complexity. The book's presiding genius is Pascal, and like him McCullough is effective in provoking readers to respond. The book refuses closure, and toward its end McCullough's bishop writes: '""What is truth?""' is the beginning of a Platonic dialogue and the end of a Johannine one."" That's an excellently aphoristic epigraph for a lovely and unusual book, which I'm grateful to have read. --Paul J. Griffiths

Author Information

Ross McCullough is an Associate Professor of Theology at George Fox University and Assistant Director of the Honors Program. He lives in Newberg, Oregon, with his wife and four children.

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