death 32
What We Forgot About Death (And Life)
Without the Incarnation, the philosopher’s death remains incomplete.
Erich Maria Remarque’s Grief
He decides to write about his experience. Two earlier novels were dismal affairs. But now in 1927, over the course of a few months, he fills each page with pain…
Facing a New Year of Grief
Grief is not a process to work through, a disorder to heal, a condition to treat, or an illness to cure.
An Ordinary Citizen Honors A Man of Extraordinary Decency
President Carter showed what was possible when people came together for a cause and acted out of decency.
Figures of Death and Deathlessness
But our culture’s celebration of Halloween suggests that we know yet more. We sense not only that we are dust and will return to it; we also sense that life…
Living To Die Well
We are not meant to die alone in nursing homes and hospitals, with gray faces, morphine drips, and flickering television screens. We are meant to live, die, and live eternally…
Remembering Loss Together: A Review of The Meaning of Mourning
The need to reconcile with one’s finitude and live as good a life in light of this was made clear by many of the more successful essays and tallied with…
Immigrant Cemeteries
No one even tried to keep me. The dead, not an argumentative sort to begin with, never had the chance. The living, God bless them, had been so thoroughly tutored…
Taborian Cultural Competence
How do you measure the beauty, fittingness, and purposefulness of Hewitt, his family, farm, and community? I hope no one tries to innovate an inventory to do it.
Christian Platonism and the Eternal Good
Christian Platonism’s affirmation that we are spiritual beings who will outlive this current life, in one manner or another, lends us powerful impetus to reconsider what it means to spend…
Reading Petrarch’s Secretum with College Sophomores
When Petrarch uses Augustine to call himself out for being bound and dragged down by the “chains of love and glory,” students are forced to consider what it is they…
Finding Rest in the Immanent Frame: a Review of Tish Harrison Warren’s Prayer in the Night
This prayer, which enumerates what Warren calls “a taxonomy of vulnerability,” epitomizes how, far from being irrelevant or obscure, the mysteries of God fill the hardest parts of life.
Saving String, Kicking Leaves: Donald Hall’s Elegies
Hall’s elegiac poetry and prose teach grim lessons that are worth heeding, but there is also a sort of unsentimental, necessary hope—a hope for continuity and unexpected rebirth, a hope…
We are Bound by Suffering and Love
Many religions understand suffering to be laden with the potential for spiritual awakening through a reduction of worldly attachments. But Christianity has a unique understanding of suffering that offers a…
Heighten the Mystery
With California burning, Antarctica melting, and a death-toll spiraling, we’re left with a looming question: Can a people walking in darkness yet be made to see?
Pancakes with My Father
My father cried the day his stroke began, as he lay in the emergency ward, watching himself lose his speech and his strength. He cried the day after the stroke…
Dying Properly—like a Dumb Ass (A Dispatch)
Little do I know that in a few days I will have died properly: by explosion.
Walking in a Dead Man’s Shoes
A woman in another kind of grief uttered the terrible “should have been.”
Dirt Thick with Known Dead
While wandering in a used bookstore this summer, I picked up Donald Hall’s String Too Short to be Saved. I enjoyed Hall’s stories about his grandparents’ farm (the book’s title…
Love in the Place of Almost Death
At the height of the political tension in King Lear, the corrupt usurpers of Lear’s throne are at the helm of Britain’s defense against French invaders. Cordelia, Lear’s truly beloved…
Remembering Florence King
Louisville, Kentucky. “Reading Florence King is like opening a blast furnace,” reporter Liz Trotta said of her years ago. That fire is now out. The writer and satirist died on…
