The Body of This Death
The Body of This Death
Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster
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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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What People Are Saying
“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 of Why Read Pascal? and Israel: A Christian Grammar
“A Screwtape for our times.”
—Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex
“Most books by Christian theologians fit into an established genre—whether the standard monograph, or the apologetic tract, or excavations in the spiritual life. In this book, the brilliant young Catholic thinker Ross McCullough offers a new way of theological reflection, indebted above all to the Columbian Catholic thinker N. G. Davila. Written for Christian intellectuals but highly readable, the book provides a thick portrait of what it means to live and think as a Catholic, in counterposition to the whole panoply of alternatives available today, including within the Church.”
—Matthew Levering, James N. Jr. and Mary D. Perry Chair of Theology, Mundelein Seminary
“It is impossible to say what this book is: Epistolary novel? Pastoral handbook? Theological science fiction? Yet if I don’t know what it is, I do know what it does: It awakens the soul with the contagious laugh of one who has seen the incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ and so refuses to take this world’s political or technological crises as ultimate. The Archbishop wields irony not in self-defense but for self-involvement; his is not the irony of the cynic but of the mystic, the martyr. Ross McCullough has given us a brilliant vision of holy sanity.”
—Jeffrey Bilbro, Professor of English, Grove City College, and editor-in-chief at Front Porch Republic