“The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity,” reads the English version of the catechism available on the Vatican’s website. When people find out what she does, the first question they usually ask her is whether she thinks hell exists.Ĭatholic theology is clear that it does. Henning is the author of a study of early Christian writings about hell. She once told a podcast host that she could talk about hell all day. Milton declares at the outset of Paradise Lost that he is writing about Satan and hell to “justify the ways of God to men.” This is the kind of statement of intent that deeply interests UD’s Henning, who studies what people, particularly early Christians, are trying to accomplish when they talk about hell. He’s by far the most interesting figure in John Milton’s epic 17th-century poem Paradise Lost, giving us delicious lines that read freshly today, like “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” This is a guy who’s fun to hang around with. Only the best-looking actors play him and his minions. He cuts a charmingly roguish figure and has for centuries. According to legend, Satan got Robert Johnson’s soul at a Mississippi crossroads in exchange for music talent, but the bargaining didn’t go as well when the devil went down to Georgia looking for a soul to steal, or so says the Charlie Daniels Band in its 1979 No. In a Benét-parodying 1993 episode of The Simpsons, Homer sues to undo a deal in which he swapped his soul for a doughnut. In a well-known 1936 Stephen Vincent Benét story, attorney Daniel Webster fights the devil in a court battle on behalf of a New Hampshire farmer who sold his soul in exchange for seven years of good crop yields. Take, for example, how we speak to our desires with stories about the trade in souls. We tell and retell stories about hell and damnation a lot.
Hell, in other words, teaches us what it means to be good. Each what-not-to-do catalog is a rhetorical mirror that reflects how we think about what it means to live a moral life and how the meaning of morality has changed through time. Our explanations for how a soul gets condemned to hell are even more important, she said. Henning teaches her students - and us - that the details of our stories about hell have changed over the centuries, reflecting evolving anxieties and fears.
“I thought it was really interesting, especially on a campus that emphasizes community and connection to one another.” “One of the students depicted hell as never being able to log off their phone and always seeing their friends doing things without them but never being able to message or communicate with them,” she said. Meghan Henning, an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, sometimes asks her students for their versions of what hell might look like in today’s contemporary world.
Satan, hell and the temptations that doom the damned are baked into our collective cultural consciousness through centuries of story, song and image. Honestly, it has never really cooled off. Meanwhile, over on Netflix, Lucifer is solving crime while running a nightclub in Los Angeles that looks pretty spectacular, if salacious opulence is your thing. Broadway’s Hadestown raked in eight Tony Awards including best musical, and The Good Place is NBC’s highest-rated comedy series. Across the pop culture landscape, eternal perdition is having a moment.
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