Eternities.

Some of the recent talk about eternity at the Fear and Loathing in Georgetown blog came to mind when I read this, in an essay by Robert Jenson (who may someday be thought of as "the theologian of Time," given his steady conviction that time is not just stuff our souls happen to be halfway stuck in):

But there are many putative eternities and correspondingly many putative gods. There is, for example, the kind of eternity of which Plato spoke, that is to say, the still point at the center of the wheel of time, a depth of reality in which time simply does not move, a great nunc stans, a standing present tense. At an opposite extreme of sophistication, the point about ancestors in animistic faith is that an ancestor is someone who has gotten so old that nothing surprises him or her any longer, so that in consultation with the ancestor the surprising things that time brings forth are unveiled as not surprising at all.

-Robert Jenson, "Faith and the Integrity of the Polity." Essays in Theology of Culture. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. (98)