http://pblosser.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_pblosser_archive.html#116904430137836968
Hell and Other Destinations
by Tom Bethell
Few secular writers these days would contemplate writing a lengthy
essay on Hell. Piers Paul Read did so because someone at Farm Street,
the Jesuit church in the most fashionable part of London, asked him to
give a talk on the subject. Later it was rejected. A new parish priest
had been appointed to the church, and is said to have ruled that the
talks in the intended series should be on secular subjects. "I don't
know, in fact, if any talks were ever given," Read told me by email.
"Mine was not, but was rewritten as an essay." It is published for the
first time as the leading article in an absorbing collection of his
Catholic journalism, Hell And Other Destinations: A Novelist's
Reflections on This World And the Next (Ignatius Press, 2006).
Perhaps the leading Catholic writer in England today, Read is the
author of many books, including the "authorized" biography of Alec
Guinness (2005). Perhaps his best-known book is Alive, the story of...
