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Beyond: How Humankind Thinks About Heaven
"Beautifully written, expertly researched and masterfully presented, this tour of how heaven has been understood throughout history is absolutely fascinating." --James Martin, SJ, author of Jesus: A Pilgrimage
A smart and thought-provoking cultural history of heaven.
What do we think of when we think about heaven? What might it look like? Who or what might be there?
Since humans began to huddle together for protection thousands of years ago, these questions have been part of how civilizations and cultures define heaven, the good place beyond this one. From Christianity to Islam to Hinduism and beyond, from the brush of Michelangelo to the pen of Dante, people across millennia have tried to explain and describe heaven in ways that are distinctive and analogous, unique and universal.
In this engrossing cultural history of heaven, Catherine Wolff delves into how people and cultures have defined heaven over the centuries. She describes how different faiths and religions have framed it, how the sense of heaven has evolved, and how nonreligious influences have affected it, from the Enlightenment to the increasingly nonreligious views of heaven today. Wolff looks deep into the accounts of heaven to discover what's common among them and what makes each conception distinct and memorable. The result is Beyond, an engaging, thoughtful exploration of an idea that is central to our humanity and our desire to define an existence beyond death.
A smart and thought-provoking cultural history of heaven.
What do we think of when we think about heaven? What might it look like? Who or what might be there?
Since humans began to huddle together for protection thousands of years ago, these questions have been part of how civilizations and cultures define heaven, the good place beyond this one. From Christianity to Islam to Hinduism and beyond, from the brush of Michelangelo to the pen of Dante, people across millennia have tried to explain and describe heaven in ways that are distinctive and analogous, unique and universal.
In this engrossing cultural history of heaven, Catherine Wolff delves into how people and cultures have defined heaven over the centuries. She describes how different faiths and religions have framed it, how the sense of heaven has evolved, and how nonreligious influences have affected it, from the Enlightenment to the increasingly nonreligious views of heaven today. Wolff looks deep into the accounts of heaven to discover what's common among them and what makes each conception distinct and memorable. The result is Beyond, an engaging, thoughtful exploration of an idea that is central to our humanity and our desire to define an existence beyond death.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published May 25, 2021
24 people are currently reading
449 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
December 28, 2022
I like how Wolff describes her project: “It is a history of hope, not an account of the afterlife itself.” She explores such hope in a curious, non-pretentious way, with an openly-admitted partiality for Christian poetry. Some visions describe finding paradise, not in the future or in another life, but in the course of living every day. And maybe Wolff finds the clearest language about that in Hindu and Buddhist traditions.
She investigates heaven in five religious worlds, then looks at spiritualist and scientific understandings of “life after life.” Here is one fascinating tidbit concerning near-death experiences: “Interestingly, people from indigenous cultures do not go through a life review—perhaps because their sense of interconnectedness and unity is woven through their earthly life, and individual accountability is less important than in Western culture.”
In another of many great observations, Wolff quotes Frederick Buechner, who describes our psychological imperative like this: “Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.”
She investigates heaven in five religious worlds, then looks at spiritualist and scientific understandings of “life after life.” Here is one fascinating tidbit concerning near-death experiences: “Interestingly, people from indigenous cultures do not go through a life review—perhaps because their sense of interconnectedness and unity is woven through their earthly life, and individual accountability is less important than in Western culture.”
In another of many great observations, Wolff quotes Frederick Buechner, who describes our psychological imperative like this: “Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.”
April 28, 2022
I was really excited for this but it’s a tough one. It’s not scholarly. It’s not personal. It’s not journalistic, or anecdotal, or sociological. It tries to be each one, but never really hits its mark with any specific or consistent tone.
September 28, 2021
Fun comprehensive jumping across multiple spiritual and religious ponds with the same question in mind: what happens to us when we die?
I enjoyed learning about how different belief systems address this question, imagining the role death plays in the larger cosmic story. There were times when the writing felt slow and cumbersome, and other times when I was grateful for Wolff’s ability to condense complex ideas into simplified terms.
My biggest takeaway is that the way we conceptualize death fundamentally informs the way we orient our lives here on earth—yet at the end of the day, there is no proof that any of our theories are correct. “All we have are stories and intuitions,” I heard someone say once. This being the case, our stories about death are some of the most sacred and significant stories we have. They are stories we need to be telling ourselves and our children often. We also need to be intentionally questioning and developing these stories. They need to evolve with us and follow us into the future. As a culture, then, we need to build better storytelling practices!
Throughout reading I couldn’t help but feel a sense of uncertainty around the purpose of the book. Wolff’s regular anecdotes and admissions made it read at times like a memoir or essay, while some of the headier chapters resembled textbook passages. I think the author intended to make the writing seem more personal with her interjections, like narrative nonfiction, but it didn’t land that way for me.
I enjoyed learning about how different belief systems address this question, imagining the role death plays in the larger cosmic story. There were times when the writing felt slow and cumbersome, and other times when I was grateful for Wolff’s ability to condense complex ideas into simplified terms.
My biggest takeaway is that the way we conceptualize death fundamentally informs the way we orient our lives here on earth—yet at the end of the day, there is no proof that any of our theories are correct. “All we have are stories and intuitions,” I heard someone say once. This being the case, our stories about death are some of the most sacred and significant stories we have. They are stories we need to be telling ourselves and our children often. We also need to be intentionally questioning and developing these stories. They need to evolve with us and follow us into the future. As a culture, then, we need to build better storytelling practices!
Throughout reading I couldn’t help but feel a sense of uncertainty around the purpose of the book. Wolff’s regular anecdotes and admissions made it read at times like a memoir or essay, while some of the headier chapters resembled textbook passages. I think the author intended to make the writing seem more personal with her interjections, like narrative nonfiction, but it didn’t land that way for me.
July 13, 2021
Beautifully written but strangely off-putting survey of humanity’s concepts of heaven. Less a coherent history than a series of snapshots. I wish it had been more scholarly. It was beautiful at points but verged on pop psychology with pseudoscience at others. Engrossing and boring, meticulous and superficial in equal measure. A strange, disappointing paradox of a book.
June 21, 2021
Very well-written. Provides a general overview of major religions as well as modern science and psychology. If you want your very specific flavor of religious practice spelled out accurately, you’ll probably be disappointed because that’s not what the book is for. It gives a helpful context for how we arrived at our view of the afterlife and challenges us to consider what to do with the millions and millions of alternative beliefs. Great book.
July 15, 2021
An excellent cross-reference of the different faith traditions and their notions of an afterlife. While it skews towards the Western and Abrahamic religions, it does spend time on ancient notions as well as lesser known traditions. It is a little uneven at times and near the end appears to be grasping at straws in order to give some weight to the more novel, recent, or science-based concepts on what happens to us after we die.
June 25, 2021
Stilted, imprecise, and much less interesting than it should have been. It was somehow a rushed work, while simultaneously it dragged in the dullest way. I was excited about this work, I wish it had been better executed.
August 11, 2021
“We are becoming aware that our customary linear way of thinking is far too limiting, and our understanding of time is expanding to include many more dimensions than the past that is gone, the present that is here, the future that is not yet.”
“The wise course is to find peace with questions, with doubt, rather than through prefabricated conclusions; to pursue clues of the divine without feeling obliged to prove anything.”
Interesting survey of history of what the author aptly calls “beyond,” instead of heaven or the afterlife, which I really appreciated because there were times the author spoke of her own religious lens preferentially. She even included near death experiences and a very odd experimental sound based “trip” so not a scholarly work, and I think she admits she talked to a few practitioners of some of the religions and called it good. It felt like an Atlantic article, so I liked it, and death has been weighing heavy on my mind in this time of pandemic and some tragic early deaths in my life. Is death the greatest mystery of all simply because we just don’t know? Like, we know, but we never can really know. I believe all these stories and none of them, and float in the mystery.
This ideal self springs from the imagination and is nothing less than the reflection of the divine in the world. It is through the creative, one might say sacred, exercise of the imagination that our very souls arise.
The historical religions that have played a central role in inspiring and preserving ideas about what might lie beyond earthly existence have flourished for some five thousand years. But how is it that we came to have such ideas at all? What is it about human nature and our capacities developed through evolution that gave rise to our sense of other realities?
Over a long period—from 30,000 to 60,000 years ago—we developed what’s called “cognitive fluidity,” the capacity for knowledge and ideas to flow freely between these areas of specialized intelligence, which in turn provided us with new ways to think and act. As for consciousness, it too arrived gradually, but eventually we woke up.
Diarmuid O’Murchu tells a story of the Moken tribe
“It was immersion in the Earth, not escape from it, that defined our sacredness,” he wrote. “The Earth itself was perceived to be a living organism pulsating with the heartbeat of God.”
One will never know if the deed one is performing will be the one that will free the last spark of trapped light—or prevent its release—so every action is conceivably of definitive consequence. Each of us is responsible, and we are responsible together. The fate of creation is at stake. —
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel gives us a distinctly Jewish version, one that is firmly rooted in the present.
And when we feel our souls stir, or are graced with an unexpected insight or a holy encounter, eternity is suddenly fulfilled. These moments constitute ongoing salvation, the chance to gather our scattered lives, to heal wounds and soothe strife, to come into harmony and clarity with God. This is all part of a great ritual of history wherein the ultimate meaning of our deeds extends far beyond our individual lives and our time, toward, perhaps,
But instead of reaching outside and upward toward a God who resides in a heavenly realm, Hindus reach deep into our being—“the beyond within.” Their religion is their guide to the fulfillment of their human potential, to the transformation of their nature, to ever-higher states of being and union with God. It is a process of “involution,” sustained by the atman, God within.
For though a body might end, life does not. It is a continuum, and what endures is not an individual spirit but life itself. To explain this idea, Punita spoke of how we lose ourselves in deep sleep: we have no relation to the world, but we return refreshed. Energy, life, flows unceasingly through us, in sleep and waking states, and it is the same with the transition from one body to another at death.
And she would never ask anything of Krishna, as he has already decided what is best for her. Lifting one hand, she said to me: “When I am in distress, I am in one hand of Krishna.” Lifting the other, she said, “And when I am in happiness, I am in the other hand of Krishna. I am always in the hands of Krishna, so there’s nothing to worry about presently! Nothing good, nothing bad, things just the way they should be.”
In The Map of Heaven, neurosurgeon Eben Alexander laments that we have lost a deep, hidden side of our lives, a side that we keep secret even from ourselves because our culture has no place for it. His concern puts me in mind of the sense Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) had of a vast and overwhelming hidden reality: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
“The wise course is to find peace with questions, with doubt, rather than through prefabricated conclusions; to pursue clues of the divine without feeling obliged to prove anything.”
Interesting survey of history of what the author aptly calls “beyond,” instead of heaven or the afterlife, which I really appreciated because there were times the author spoke of her own religious lens preferentially. She even included near death experiences and a very odd experimental sound based “trip” so not a scholarly work, and I think she admits she talked to a few practitioners of some of the religions and called it good. It felt like an Atlantic article, so I liked it, and death has been weighing heavy on my mind in this time of pandemic and some tragic early deaths in my life. Is death the greatest mystery of all simply because we just don’t know? Like, we know, but we never can really know. I believe all these stories and none of them, and float in the mystery.
This ideal self springs from the imagination and is nothing less than the reflection of the divine in the world. It is through the creative, one might say sacred, exercise of the imagination that our very souls arise.
The historical religions that have played a central role in inspiring and preserving ideas about what might lie beyond earthly existence have flourished for some five thousand years. But how is it that we came to have such ideas at all? What is it about human nature and our capacities developed through evolution that gave rise to our sense of other realities?
Over a long period—from 30,000 to 60,000 years ago—we developed what’s called “cognitive fluidity,” the capacity for knowledge and ideas to flow freely between these areas of specialized intelligence, which in turn provided us with new ways to think and act. As for consciousness, it too arrived gradually, but eventually we woke up.
Diarmuid O’Murchu tells a story of the Moken tribe
“It was immersion in the Earth, not escape from it, that defined our sacredness,” he wrote. “The Earth itself was perceived to be a living organism pulsating with the heartbeat of God.”
One will never know if the deed one is performing will be the one that will free the last spark of trapped light—or prevent its release—so every action is conceivably of definitive consequence. Each of us is responsible, and we are responsible together. The fate of creation is at stake. —
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel gives us a distinctly Jewish version, one that is firmly rooted in the present.
And when we feel our souls stir, or are graced with an unexpected insight or a holy encounter, eternity is suddenly fulfilled. These moments constitute ongoing salvation, the chance to gather our scattered lives, to heal wounds and soothe strife, to come into harmony and clarity with God. This is all part of a great ritual of history wherein the ultimate meaning of our deeds extends far beyond our individual lives and our time, toward, perhaps,
But instead of reaching outside and upward toward a God who resides in a heavenly realm, Hindus reach deep into our being—“the beyond within.” Their religion is their guide to the fulfillment of their human potential, to the transformation of their nature, to ever-higher states of being and union with God. It is a process of “involution,” sustained by the atman, God within.
For though a body might end, life does not. It is a continuum, and what endures is not an individual spirit but life itself. To explain this idea, Punita spoke of how we lose ourselves in deep sleep: we have no relation to the world, but we return refreshed. Energy, life, flows unceasingly through us, in sleep and waking states, and it is the same with the transition from one body to another at death.
And she would never ask anything of Krishna, as he has already decided what is best for her. Lifting one hand, she said to me: “When I am in distress, I am in one hand of Krishna.” Lifting the other, she said, “And when I am in happiness, I am in the other hand of Krishna. I am always in the hands of Krishna, so there’s nothing to worry about presently! Nothing good, nothing bad, things just the way they should be.”
In The Map of Heaven, neurosurgeon Eben Alexander laments that we have lost a deep, hidden side of our lives, a side that we keep secret even from ourselves because our culture has no place for it. His concern puts me in mind of the sense Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) had of a vast and overwhelming hidden reality: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
October 27, 2021
This work begins slowly, with a sort of pre history of the way our ancestors may have evolved their thinking about the afterlife, God, and life.
It then turns into a pretty good survey of major religious thought and theology.
This is a well written book that I think is intended to make us think about our world view. The author does not attempt to persuade or convince, only presents ideas.
The book is easy to read, and teaches a lot about aspects of cultures we may not be family related with.
On a side note, the author switches between first person and third person narrative that is oddly (but pleasantly ) female based. This made me feel more connected to the writer and makes her seem much more genuine in portions that she is trying to emphasize the personal nature of these philosophies.
Definitely recommended for those on a spiritual or discovery journey
It then turns into a pretty good survey of major religious thought and theology.
This is a well written book that I think is intended to make us think about our world view. The author does not attempt to persuade or convince, only presents ideas.
The book is easy to read, and teaches a lot about aspects of cultures we may not be family related with.
On a side note, the author switches between first person and third person narrative that is oddly (but pleasantly ) female based. This made me feel more connected to the writer and makes her seem much more genuine in portions that she is trying to emphasize the personal nature of these philosophies.
Definitely recommended for those on a spiritual or discovery journey
August 29, 2021
Many different religions suit different aspirations, times and countries. All doctrines are only several different paths all leading to the same end.
Spiritualism is a religious movement based in the belief that souls survive the death of the physical body and that those of us still on earth can communicate with them.
God does not levy a final judgement but gives us an eternity of opportunities to grow spiritually in the other world.
We will be inspired to think about our lives and how we may pursue ultimate self realization.
Interconnectedness and unity is focused more in Eastern cultures as opposed to individual accountability in Western cultures.
Continual rebirths are the natural result of karma.
Spiritualism is a religious movement based in the belief that souls survive the death of the physical body and that those of us still on earth can communicate with them.
God does not levy a final judgement but gives us an eternity of opportunities to grow spiritually in the other world.
We will be inspired to think about our lives and how we may pursue ultimate self realization.
Interconnectedness and unity is focused more in Eastern cultures as opposed to individual accountability in Western cultures.
Continual rebirths are the natural result of karma.
November 22, 2025
The description of Beyond immediately touched something tender and curious in me. Heaven is a topic so many people think about but rarely explore with depth and Catherine Wolff approaches it with respect, wonder, and a scholar’s eye. The idea of journeying through countless cultures and religions, seeing how each one paints its own version of hope and eternity, feels incredibly powerful.
I want to read this book because it promises not just knowledge, but perspective, a reminder that even across continents and belief systems, humans share a common yearning for meaning, belonging, and possibility beyond this life. Any book that can illuminate that shared humanity is worth reading. I’m truly excited to pick this one up.
I want to read this book because it promises not just knowledge, but perspective, a reminder that even across continents and belief systems, humans share a common yearning for meaning, belonging, and possibility beyond this life. Any book that can illuminate that shared humanity is worth reading. I’m truly excited to pick this one up.
March 15, 2022
Though the author acknowledges limitations to her perspective because of her own Christian beliefs, this book offers a fascinating exploration of how different people throughout history and modernity have thought of the afterlife. It adds so much context to religion, art, and philosophy for me. I really appreciate it!
July 8, 2021
Cool topic, thoroughly examined. BUT, it is super dense and academic. It’s essentially a textbook about how humans have perceived heaven throughout history and within different religions. If that sounds good to you, you’ll love it.
dnf
June 3, 2021DNF
July 17, 2021
Didn’t finish the book. It’s an interesting topic but it is not insightful and boring.
September 24, 2021
Very interesting and fantastic read.
I like how the author explores other religious idea of heaven.
I hope more books nonfiction about heaven to publish in the future.
I like how the author explores other religious idea of heaven.
I hope more books nonfiction about heaven to publish in the future.
November 8, 2021
This kaleidoscopic book didn't break new ground for me, but it's still a dazzling survey of how different groups of people have seen or see the after life.
January 22, 2022
Thoughtful and comprehensive in what takes place after death. She did her homework
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews