The most marital answer ever to the old question "You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?"

From the novelist Geraldine Brooks, interviewed by the NYT:

First, I would bring back [my late husband] Tony Horwitz, because he was more fun at a dinner party than anyone I know. Then, because I think it’s rather rude — and a little dull — to invite writers without their partners, I would have my fellow Australian Tim Winton and his wife, Denise, who is a marine scientist. I’d add Margaret Atwood and bring back her partner, Graeme Gibson, a passionate conservationist.

You could have anyone. You could have Shakespeare or Dickens. But you're going to have Margaret Atwood's husband, "a passionate conservationist." I wonder what's the conservationist position about bringing people back from the dead. But the only person she exercised her resurrection power on was her own husband.

That last link goes to Wikipedia, where I see that Brook's husband died suddenly of a heart attack 3 years ago, when he was only 60. 

I look up Atwood's husband and see that he too died 3 years ago, so the dinner-party resurrection power was exercised on 2 persons — both because of their status as husbands.

Gibson was 85 and had been diagnosed with dementia the year before:

Despite having written a book on birds, he could no longer identify those he liked to watch in his garden, but said "I no longer know their names, but then, they don't know my name either."

The resurrection power is a fantasy, but doesn't it seem to assume that the person is brought back in their prime?

ADDED: I had one more question, and I see a NYT column addressed it last year: "Why Is Jesus Still Wounded After His Resurrection?" 

A small excerpt:

Simon Steer, the school chaplain at Abingdon School in Abingdon, England, said to me, “The risen but scarred body of Christ is the ultimate signifier of divine empathy.” It is a reminder to Dr. Steer that in his own struggles with depression, “Christ is with me in the dark night of the soul.” Jesus himself experienced a “dark night of the soul” at the Garden of Gethsemane, where we’re told his soul was “deeply grieved,” and especially as he hung on the cross, naked, beaten and left to die, feeling forsaken by God. 

The artist Makoto Fujimura, author of the marvelous recent book “Art and Faith: A Theology of Making,” writes about the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi. Kintsugi is the art of repairing broken pottery pieces with lacquer dusted with gold. A Kintsugi master will take the broken work and create a restored piece that “makes the broken parts even more visually sophisticated,” according to Mr. Fujimura. “No two works, done with such mastery, will look the same or break the same way.” It is built on the idea that in embracing flaws and imperfections, you can create a more beautiful and more valuable piece of art. 

Applying that concept to theology, Mr. Fujimura makes this point: It’s through our brokenness that God’s grace can shine through, “as in the gold that fills fissures in Kintsugi.” Jesus came not to “fix” us, according to Mr. Fujimura, and not just to restore us, but to make us something new.