Tag: death

Grief is not a process to work through, a disorder to heal, a condition to treat, or an illness to cure.

President Carter showed what was possible when people came together for a cause and acted out of decency.

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 exists beyond death.

A Non-Believer Ponders Life, Death, and Staring into the Abyss

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 surrounded by a community of love. Creating that community of love, especially within one’s family, takes hard work and sacrifice.

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 my own experience of coming to terms with the limits on my life from my condition, both in an everyday and an ultimate sense.

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 by modern life that they could, in the same breath, say how wonderful was my “great opportunity” to go and how sad they would be that I couldn’t stay.

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’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 life here and now in a worthwhile fashion.

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 are pursuing, in college and in life.