While much of the world remains in neurotic flight from death, from the Judgment that ineluctably follows, it is vital to the vocation of the Christian that he face, unflinching, the Last Things, including that eternity of joy or woe awaiting every man born into this world. "Nothing is more certain than death," writes Saint Anselm, "nothing more uncertain than its hour." Thus a lively interest in the subject of death, our death, is essential to the maintenance of Christian identity. How will we face the end? On whom does our hope finally rest? What are the very Last Things ever to be remembered? These and other breathcatching questions are examined in this book, whose pages abound with insight and imagery drawn from the rich patrimony of the Church's wisdom and experience. Here is a fresh compendium of the thought of saints, sages and, yes, sinners, reflecting on the things that, as Pascal reminds us, take us by the throat. Writers as disparate as Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Newman, Hopkins, Eliot, Lewis, James Joyce and Flannery O'Connor adorn the pages of this literary/theological look at Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell. Here are the eschatological realities which frame our lives, erupting constantly and unexpectedly into the texture of our ordinary days. Here, then, is a complete canvassing of the Last Things, whose understanding remains centered in Christ and his Church, thus awakening that sense of hope on which we depend in the journey home to God. Where others shrink from the thought of death as sheer annihilating disaster, we remain entirely serene in that freedom vouchsafed by Christ, to face death precisely because we have thought of it as Christians. "Only one thing will end up having mattered eternally, our mode of dying - not whether it was sudden or lingering, painful or painless, anticipated or unexpected, but whether it was graceless or grace-filled. This is the lesson given in these poignant, literate pages. Over the years others have written well on the Four Last Things, but Regis Martin speaks in an especially urgent way to those living - and dying - at the turn of the millennium." - Karl Keating Author, Catholicism and Fundamentalism Regis Martin, S.T.D. is an Associate Professor of Theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, specializing in courses on the Trinity, Church, the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the world of the Catholic Literary Revival. Author of several books, he is married and the father of nine children.