L'evoluzione dell'inferno

"Hell has changed a lot over the years. The Old Testament refers exclusively to sheol, the traditional Hebrew underworld, a place of stillness in which both the righteous and the unrighteous wander in shadows. There’s no fiery torment, no wailing or gnashing of teeth. In the New Testament, several writers refer to this place under its Greek name, hades. There’s also a number of passages about Gehenna, literally “the Valley of Hinnom”, which was a real area outside Jerusalem that served as the city dump. Fires burned there constantly, to incinerate the garbage; it was also a place where the bodies of criminals were burned. The Jewish rabbinical tradition envisioned Gehenna as a purgatorial place of atonement for the ungodly. Another Greek term, tartarus, appears only once, when the author of 1 Peter writes about the angel rebellion that took place before the creation of the world. ...
Like so many formerly oppositional institutions, the church is now becoming a symptom of the culture rather than an antidote to it, giving us one less place to turn for a sober counter-narrative to the simplistic story of moral progress that stretches from Silicon Valley to Madison Avenue. Hell may be an elastic concept, as varied as the thousands of malevolencies it has described throughout history, but it remains our most resilient metaphor for the evil both around and within us".  Meghan O'Gieblyn, guardian.