Talking about the concept of the afterlife in Catholicism, would you capitalize Heaven? Moreover, what about Hell?
Heaven or heaven?
October 1st, 2009 by Andy
3 Responses to “Heaven or heaven?”
Leave a Reply
Teaching English to Preschoolers with iPhones
We (i.e. the creators of Pain in The English) developed a series of iPhone apps to teach preschool kids how to recognize letters and words. (My wife developed the characters and I did the coding.) Our own 4-year old daughter has been enjoying them. They are now available on Apple's App Store. You can search for "bitskis" on your iPhone, or visit the official website at bitskis.com.
If you have kids and own an iPhone, please check it out. It's $2.
Yes, they are both proper nouns–names of “real” places. In my experience this applies across all of Christianity.
Yes and yes.
Heaven and Hell are ‘places’. Whether or not they really exist is debatable and yet to be proven (I don’t believe either place exists and am not of any denomination of Christianity), but they would still be capitalized as they are proper nouns. Make-believe places in story books are also capitalized, although they do no exist.
That said, while I know this, I actually tend not to capitalize them most of the time. I wasn’t raised Christian and I never have been Christian, and it feels strange to me to capitalize them. Like I’m giving them some sort of validation in my own life. If anything, I seem them as general ideas, a concept, an idea, a metaphor. It’s never come naturally to me to capitalize them and I would have to think three times before doing so. I realize this can be seen as quite disrespectful. I guess I just don’t use the words often enough to worry about it much.
You should capitalize Heaven and Hell, just as you would capitalize the place names in other myths.
You wouldn’t capitalize heavenly and hellish though.