This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about front-line

theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Mola, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville,

Kentucky.

Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell once said,

to the modern mind, heaven seems bland or boring, an eternal sermon or a perpetual hymn.

Evil and the devil seemed to get the best lines.

Well, you might say until now.

Professor Gary Scott Smith of Grove City College has written a new book entitled

Heaven in the American Imagination.

Professor Smith chairs the History Department of Grove City College where he also

coordinates the curriculum in the humanities. He's a fellow with the Center for

Vision in Values. He's an award-winning professor and he's written books including

Faith in the presidency from George Washington to George W Bush and his latest book

Heaven in the American Imagination. Professor Smith, welcome to thinking in public.

Thank you, Dr. Mulder, it's good to be on. Well it's good to have the conversation

and when you consider all the books out there that

have most recently been written about heaven I think it's fair to say that

nothing's been written that well at least until your book that I would think

might be published by Oxford University

Press, but out there in the popular world, there's so many books right now that seem to

be fascinated with the topic of heaven. I know how those books originated.

...