After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory
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One of the most profound, deeply affecting questions we face as human beings is the matter of our mortality–and its connection to immorality. Ancient animist ghost cultures, Egyptian mummification, late Jewish hopes of resurrection, Christian eternal salvation, Muslim belief in hell and paradise all spring from a remarkably consistent impulse to tether a triumph over death to our conduct in life.
In After Lives, British scholar John Casey provides a rich historical and philosophical exploration of the world beyond, from the ancient Egyptians to St. Thomas Aquinas, from Martin Luther to modern Mormons.
The ancient Egyptians saw the afterlife as flowing from ma’at, a sense of being in harmony with life, a concept that includes truth, order, justice, and the fundamental law of the universe. “It is an optimistic view of life,” he writes. “It is an ethic that connects wisdom with moral goodness.” Perhaps just as revealing, Casey finds, are modern secular interpretations of heaven and hell, as he probes the place of goodness, virtue, and happiness in the age of psychology and scientific investigation.
With elegant writing, a magisterial grasp of a vast literary and religious history, and moments of humor and irony, After Lives sheds new light on the question of life, death, and morality in human culture.
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