If we learn anything from the peace that is in us, it is that it represents the highest good to which no only persons but whole people can be called, and we cannot be content with our own serenity and, at the same time, indifferent to the swirls of anger that threaten to rend the fabric of society all around us. To do so would be to make of ourselves hypocrites, content to save ourselves and lose the world.
Christianity arrives in a Platonic landscape where the body is a husk around a soul, imperfect and soon to be shrugged off. For some pagans, the Christian notion of a resurrected body was distinctly odd, especially as there was no possibility of floating off somewhere more etheric. In the next life you still had a body, just not that one that slowly became dust... The body is not a tomb, it's a pleasure, and it goes where we go because we're completely bound up with it.
~ Martin Shaw in "A God with a Dog in the Race" (essay)