"Hell, or Gehenna, the fire, all that, those are spatial and visual metaphors for the state of deep loneliness that comes from having rejected the Divine Love. That's how I put it. Hell is not so much a place...it's a condition, a state of being..."
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Fr. Robert Barron on Misreading Genesis
One of Fr. Barron's "rich", "multivalent" insights into Genesis is the significance of "non-violence" to the creation story. He describes Genesis as "a great humanistic text".
"Don't interpret it literally!" Right?
This is why the Catholic Church is finally dying before our eyes. Its reduction of the Hebrew Bible to a chrstological "allegory" led inevitably to a rejection of the literal historical data it contains and thus to higher criticism and evolutionism (two Protestant creations that are now considered virtual dogmas of Catholicism).
Conservative Catholics for whatever reason seem mentally or emotionally or spiritually unable to understand this. Their constant defenses of the "conservatism" of a Church that insists the Written Word of G-d is historical fiction is doomed to achieve nothing.
Defend Genesis or shut up.