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“Death be not proud,” taunted John Donne. “One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.” Death interrupts our view of eternity, a fearsome jalousie obscuring a future we must approach. Like Donne, we console and distract ourselves by turns with bravado, with pleasure, with laughter and finally with God.  Peter Berger, eminent sociologist of religion, wrote that “the power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death, or more accurately, as they walk, inevitably, toward it.”

Religion masters death by writing it into the second act of a cosmic drama of the soul.  For Christians, the principal figure in this drama is Jesus, whose own death and resurrection conquered death for all.  The glory of this victory, and its appalling price,…

Hi everyone.  I’ve been a bad blogger this summer, but then the summer is for vacation, no? Even vacation from the all-encompassing Internet.

One of the things I did this summer was read novels, including the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman–the most famous is the first book, The Golden Compass.  I had heard that they were entertaining and well-written; I’d also heard that they were controversial and anti-Catholic.  My impression after reading them is that they are anti-organized-religion-of-any-kind.

I found them entertaining fantasy novels, but not all that different from lots of other books–until the last novel, The Amber Spyglass.  This book tells a very unusual story about God, to say the least.

What struck me most as a humanist, though, was the novel’s attitude toward death. I don’t want to give it all away in case you haven’t read it and want to, but Pullman has a dismissal of the need…

Mind & Soul www.coebrownacademy.com

Recent blogs dealing with certain aspects of the life issue brought to mind the opposite side of the coin; a topic not discussed much but, as the saying goes, is as inevitable as taxes. Death is almost a taboo topic. Many faiths tell us of there being a certain clarity after death, albeit not always a happy revelation. Yet we seem afraid to talk about it or probe and learn.

www-i5.informatik.rwth-aachen.de

One part of the issue is determining what is dying. One question (there are others) to ask is: Are mind and soul one or two distinct things. Do mind and soul stay together after death or do they separate permanently at the time of death? Eckhart Tolle in his excellent book ‘The Power of Now’ talks of the saying of Descartes as a great fallacy. That is, the connecting of thought/mind with will/soul or considering them one and the same is…

After reading the posts about salvation and purgatory, it got me thinking. Thinking about how little I think about those things. So I wondered, is it just me? Or as a Jew, are these topics not really at the forefront. The answer is, I don’t really know.

One of the most exciting aspects of being a part of this blog is the opportunity I have for a greater understanding of my religion and others. Because, when I ponder these and other questions, the answer usually is – I don’t really know.

So, I did a brief online search on Judaism and afterlife and came across this excerpt on myjewishlearning.com:

Judaism is famously ambiguous about this matter. The immortality of the soul, the World to Come, and the resurrection of the dead all feature prominently in Jewish tradition, but the logistics of what these things are and how they relate to each other has always…

My last post received a comment that was so important, I thought it deserved a whole post. A person asks about a Catholic friend who seems to have a mistakenly optimistic belief about his own chances for salvation. Here is the comment:

This person does not even attempt to lead a Holy life, much intentional lack of self control and mortal sin in his life. The danger I feel for this person is that he in all sincerity feels that he will receive salvation if he were to die in this state of his life.

He says, he realizes that he is living a life of sin, but as long as he repents before he dies, or even on his death bed that he will just have to spend some time in purgatory, but he will receive salvation (Heaven).

The reader asked about about both “salvation” and “purgatory” and I want to say…