Fr Kimel's _Destined for Joy: The Gospel of Universal Salvation_
a teaser not a review
If you're looking for a love story, I've just read it.
And it's not only the greatest love story ever told. It's a nonfiction love story.
But, wait! There's more you should know:
It's about YOU!
This book is personally generous in the sharing of intimate details and pastorally sensitive in anticipating the needs and concerns of those hearing the Good News.
Of course, I'm talking about Fr Kimel's _Destined for Joy: The Gospel of Universal Salvation_
This link will get you to the Amazon links for hardcover, paperback, kindle & audible versions.
In a nutshell, this book tells the story of why we're all here and where we're ALL headed and why.
In _Destined for Joy_, Fr Kimel asks the same question and provides the same answer posed in my old Baltimore Catechism:
Why did God make us?
God made us to show forth His goodness and to share with us His everlasting happiness in heaven.
Thing is, Fr Kimel expands on his answer without crawfishing or backtracking and with no equivocations, loopholes, exceptions or quite simply - ifs, ands or buts!
A few years ago, I anonymously underwrote a certain Festschrift by providing grants to contributing authors. My only request was for it to be written accessibly for a general audience. It turned out to be a naive request and unreasonable because the authors had a professional need to write for the guild. I bring that up to provide context for yet another attraction that _Destined for Joy_ has, in fact, a dual appeal. First, Fr Kimel has written this book with intellectual rigor and extensive quotes of both esteemed academics and revered fathers & mothers of the Church. Next, in a most affable and very illuminating homiletic style, he then explicates that content, translating it into an eminently accessible form.
To give you some idea of the breadth and depth of Fr Kimel's treatment of universal salvation, below is the checklist I always use to catalog any new ideas, which I've gleaned from various sources as pertaining to my own ongoing universalist project. It's based on Lonergan's functional specialties. So, before reading _Destined for Joy_, I electronically searched its contents to get a grasp of its scope & depth. For those thus interested, it touched all of these following bases, staying longer on some:
personal
pastoral
Good News
philosophical
historical
exegetical
liturgical
patristic
conciliar
doctrinal
paterological
Christological
pneumatological
Trinitarian
anthropological
ecclesiological
sacramental
soteriological
sophiological
eschatological
systematics
communications
pastoral
homiletic
Whether you're in the guild or the pew, _Destined for Joy_ is for you!
Thank you, Fr Al, blogger and theologian.
Aaron Edward Kimel, ora pro nobis.