mortality

Imagining Death

Confronting euthanasia, S. Kay Toombs re-imagines death in the context of Christian covenantal community. Continue Reading »

16 Nov 2023

Worst Cases

by John Wilson

Planning ahead with an eye toward potential catastrophe is a much-needed antidote to both despair and the presentism bedeviling much of our public discourse. Continue Reading »

4 Jun 2021

Human mortality has always fascinated the greatest creative minds—from Homer declaiming on the slayings of Patroclus and Hector, to Sigmund Freud speculating on death drives. Roger Scruton even locates the significance of artistic endeavor in the fact that we understand our existence to be . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Jun 2020

Mortal Frames

by J. Todd Billings

A Time to Keep: Theology, Mortality, and the Shape of a Human Life by ephraim radner baylor, 304 pages, $49.95 A Time to Keep is an odyssey—a journey through childhood and adolescence, work and sexuality, aging and dying. The reader encounters Sigmund Freud on dying and death, . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Jun 2018

Pack Your Bags

by Matthew Hennessey

Preparing for death requires much more than putting financial affairs in order. Continue Reading »

15 Jun 2017

An Imposition of Ashes

by Russell E. Saltzman

Just lately from the forest and after a short time on the savannah, humanity acquired a sense of self. We awakened one morning, so it seems, and if we did not know who we were we at least knew we were not like the animals. We knew we died and the animals did not. We possessed an interior . . . . Continue Reading »

11 Feb 2016

In Praise of Wakes

by Mark S. Milburn

Going to a wake is always unpleasant. For one thing the departed, once embalmed, always looks like a stranger. Thus, the corkboard display of photos of the deceased as a baby, and as a teen, can only emphasize that he is now utterly a fossil. To make things worse, a wake usually comes in one of two . . . . Continue Reading »

27 Oct 2015

Between Beasts and God

by Gilbert Meilaender

Near the beginning of the twenty-fourth and last Book of Homer’s Iliad, called by Simone Weil “the only true epic” the West possesses, even the gods—detached as they are in their bliss from all sufferings—have seen enough. Achilles has become inhuman. Ignoring our animal nature, . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Jan 2002

L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?

by Leon R. Kass

You don’t have to be Jewish to drink L’Chaim, to lift a glass “To Life.” Everyone in his right mind believes that life is good and that death is bad. But Jews have always had an unusually keen appreciation of life, and not only because it has been stolen from them so often and so cruelly. . . . . Continue Reading »

1 May 2001