To get us ready forHoly Week, Peter Steinfels' Beliefs column in today's NY Times is devoted to how resurrection is treated in recent books by a Jewish, a Catholic, and an Anglican scholar, all of whom regard it as central to Jewish and Christian belief. Here is howSt. Augustine described how resurrection was a counter-cultural notion in his time:On no other point is the Christian faith so contradicted as on the resurrection of the flesh. He who was born to be a sign of contradiction (see Lk 2:34) raised his own flesh in order to respond to such an objector. He could have healed his own members so that their wounds would not appear, but he kept the scars on his body in order to heal the wound of doubt in the heart. On no other point is there such strong, such persistent, such obstinate, such contentious opposition to the Christian faith as there is on the resurrection of the flesh. Many pagan philosophers have argued at length about the immortality of the soul and in their many and various books they have recorded their opinion that the soul is immortal; but when it came to the resurrection of the flesh, they were steadfast in denying it. (Enar. in Ps 88-2, 5)