A journey through 20,000 years of history and myth in search of the answer to a single question: Do animals have souls?
Anyone who has ever mourned the loss of a cherished pet has wondered about the animal soul. Do animals survive the death of the body, or are they doomed to disappear completely when they leave this world behind? Both scientists and religious authorities have long scoffed at the idea of animals in heaven. Yet the question endures. In this wise, immensely readable book, Ptolemy Tompkins embarks on a quest for the answer--taking us on a top-speed tour of the history of the animal soul.
Equally at home with mainstream and alternative spiritual philosophies, Tompkins takes us from the savannas of Africa to the earth's first cities to the early days of the great faith traditions of both East and West. Along the way, he shows that, despite what many of us have been taught, the world's various spiritual traditions all have profoundly meaningful things to say about the animal soul, if we simply know where to look. Rescuing these ancient insights and blending them with vivid stories about animals today--from a dwarf rabbit named Angus to a manatee named Moose to a black bear named Little Bit--"The Divine Life of Animals" paints a gloriously inclusive picture of the cosmos as a place made up of both matter and spirit, in which animals are every bit as important, spiritually speaking, as the humans with whom they share the world. Though it is startlingly original, "The Divine Life of Animals" also feels strangely and instantly familiar, for it reveals truths that many of us have held in our hearts already, waiting only for someone to give fresh voice to one of the oldest and most trustworthy intuitions we possess.
The "Divine Life of Animals" offers a compelling and timeless vision of the relationship between humans and animals that will have you looking at the animals in your life with new eyes.

"From the Hardcover edition."

Whereas biomedical and feminist literature treat abortion, miscarriage, and stillbirth as differently conceptualized events, this collection explores the connections between these three categories. How have feminist debates and strategies around reproductive choice invigorated the cultural conversation about miscarriage and stillbirth? How can we imagine more nuanced engagements with the spectrum of experiences that are at stake when a pregnancy ends? And how can we effectively create a space where pregnant people contend with the ways that loss makes meaning for those who grieve and/or celebrate the end of pregnancy? This collection centres pregnancy loss as an embodied and social phenomenon within a framework that understands pregnancy as a process with no guaranteed outcomes. Interrogating Pregnancy Loss considers pregnancy as an epistemic source, one that has the capacity to reveal the limits of our collective assumptions about temporality, expectation, narrative, and social legitimacy. By interrogating loss, this collection argues that the lessons learned from loss have the capacity to serve our collective understandings of both the expected and unexpected rhythms of social and reproductive life.

The tragic, sudden death of their 25-year-old son left the Courtney and Sayre families devastated. Grief-stricken and searching for answers, his parents, siblings, other family members and friends began having experiences that they first passed off as coincidences. However, the more they shared with each other, the more they knew that the journey toward understanding had just begun. Suzanne Gene Courtney chronicles her family's path through the darkness to peace and on to acceptance, in the hope that it will help other newly bereaved parents. Through the Eyes of a Dove is a source of solace in times of sorrow, one that can help the grieving to grow, trust, believe and learn to live with their child in spirit. Author Suzanne Gene Courtney is a writer and elementary school teacher. She has taught arts and sciences, and has worked as a travel assistant. She lives with her family in Monroe, Michigan.

Several years ago in Rajasthan, an eighteen-year-old woman was burned on her husband's funeral pyre and thus became sati. Before ascending the pyre, she was expected to deliver both blessings and curses: blessings to guard her family and clan for many generations, and curses to prevent anyone from thwarting her desire to die. Sati also means blessing and curse in a broader sense. To those who revere it, sati symbolizes ultimate loyalty and self-sacrifice. It often figures near the core of a Hindu identity that feels embattled in a modern world. Yet to those who deplore it, sati is a curse, a violation of every woman's womanhood. It is murder mystified, and as such, the symbol of precisely what Hinduism should not be.
In this volume a group of leading scholars consider the many meanings of sati in India and the West; in literature, art, and opera; in religion, psychology, economics, and politics. With contributors who are both Indian and American, this is a genuinely binational, postcolonial discussion. Contributors include Karen Brown, Paul Courtright, Vidya Dehejia, Ainslie Embree, Dorothy Figueira, Lindsey Harlan, John Hawley, Robin Lewis, Ashis Nandy, and Veena Talwar Oldenburg.

This collection contains twenty-one thought-provoking essays on the controversies surrounding the moral and legal distinctions between euthanasia and "letting die." Since public awareness of this issue has increased this second edition includes nine entirely new essays which bring the treatment of the subject up-to-date. The urgency of this issue can be gauged in recent developments such as the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in the Netherlands, "how-to" manuals topping the bestseller charts in the United States, and the many headlines devoted to Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who has assisted dozens of patients to die. The essays address the range of questions involved in this issue pertaining especially to the fields of medical ethics, public policymaking, and social philosophy. The discussions consider the decisions facing medical and public policymakers, how those decisions will affect the elderly and terminally ill, and the medical and legal ramifications for patients in a permanently vegetative state, as well as issues of parent/infant rights. The book is divided into two sections. The first, "Euthanasia and the Termination of Life-Prolonging Treatment" includes an examination of the 1976 Karen Quinlan Supreme Court decision and selections from the 1990 Supreme Court decision in the case of Nancy Cruzan. Featured are articles by law professor George Fletcher and philosophers Michael Tooley, James Rachels, and Bonnie Steinbock, with new articles by Rachels, and Thomas Sullivan. The second section, "Philosophical Considerations," probes more deeply into the theoretical issues raised by the killing/letting die controversy, illustrating exceptionally well the dispute between two rival theories of ethics, consequentialism and deontology. It also includes a corpus of the standard thought on the debate by Jonathan Bennet, Daniel Dinello, Jeffrie Murphy, John Harris, Philipa Foot, Richard Trammell, and N. Ann Davis, and adds articles new to this edition by Bennett, Foot, Warren Quinn, Jeff McMahan, and Judith Lichtenberg.

In the tradition of Mary Roach's bestselling "Stiff" and Jessica Mitford's classic expose "The American Way of Death" comes this meticulously researched, refreshingly irreverent, and lavishly illustrated look at death from acclaimed author Harold Schechter. With his trademark fearlessness and bracing sense of humor, Schechter digs deep into a wealth of sources to unearth a treasure trove of surprising facts, amusing anecdotes, practical information, and timeless wisdom about that undiscovered country to which we will all one day travel. Topics include
- Death anxiety-is your fear of death normal or off the scale?
- You can't take it with you . . . or can you? Wacky wills and bizarre bequests
- The hospice experience-going out in comfort and style
- Deathbed and funeral etiquette-how to help the dying and mourn the dead with dignity
- Death on demand-why the right-to-die movement may be the next big thing
- "Good-bye everybody"-famous last words
- The embalmer's art-all dressed up and nowhere to go
- Behind the scenes at your local funeral home
- Alternative burial choices-from coral reefs to outer space
From the cold, hard facts of death to lessons in the art of dying well, from what happens in the body's last living moments to what transpires in the ground or in the furnace, from near-death experiences to speculation on the afterlife, The Whole Death Catalog leaves no gravestone unturned.

Called the "mother of beauty" by Wallace Stevens, death has been perhaps the favorite muse of modern poets. From Langston Hughes's lynch poems to Sylvia Plath's father elegies, modern poetry has tried to find a language of mourning in an age of mass death, religious doubt, and forgotten ritual. For this reason, Jahan Ramazani argues, the elegy, one of the most ancient of poetic genres, has remained one of the most vital to modern poets.
Through subtle readings of elegies, self-elegies, war poems, and the blues, Ramazani greatly enriches our critical understanding of a wide range of poets, including Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney. He also interprets the signal contributions to the American family elegy of Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Adrienne Rich, Michael Harper, and Amy Clampitt. Finally, he suggests analogies between the elegy and other kinds of contemporary mourning art--in particular, the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Grounded in genre theory and in the psychoanalysis of mourning, Ramazani's readings also draw on various historical, formal, and feminist critical approaches. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the psychology of mourning or the history of modern poetry.
"Consists of full, intelligent and lucid exposition and close reading. . . . "Poetry of Mourning" is itself a welcome contribution to modern poetry's search for a 'resonant yet credible vocabulary of grief in our time."--"Times Literary Supplement"

Beloved singer-songwriter Judy Collins draws on her personal experience with her son's suicide to guide readers through grieving the loss of a loved one who has died under tragic circumstances. The death of a loved one is always painful and the grieving process complex and profound. Yet when the loss occurs under tragic circumstances, there is a whole other set of emotional variables that the people left behind must face. Questions abound, such as "Could I have stopped this?" Feelings of guilt, shame, and even anger combine with the overwhelming sadness of losing someone who was dearly loved. Drawing on her own experience of losing her son to suicide, as well as her conversations with hundreds of people who have grieved the tragic death of a friend or family member, revered singer-songwriter Judy Collins has culled together seven powerful steps toward healing. The Seven T's are: TRUTH: Tell it. Regardless of how terrible the facts may be and how hard it is to talk about, don't hide the truth about how you lost the person you loved. TRUST: Allow it. Don't let the painful circumstances surrounding the death of your loved one prevent you from talking with friends about your loss. THERAPY: Get it. Seek help-whether through traditional talk therapy, your art, meditation, or whatever method you choose-but get the help you need. TREASURE: Hold on. Don't stop treasuring your loved one. Don't let the horrible events leading to his or her death wash away all of the things that were good and beautiful about that person's life. THRIVE: Keep living with your eyes wide open. Don't give in to the temptation to use alcohol or any other addiction to blunt or blur your sadness. TREAT: Be kind toyourself. Give yourself the gift of self-nourishment. TRIUMPH: You must. Live a life of joy, abundance, and forgiveness. From a woman famous for her wisdom and compassion, "The Seven T's" is destined to become a classic on the subject of grieving and loss.

"Singular Paths, " based extensively on interviews, breaks fresh ground by describing specifically the situations, experiences, and feelings of the often-overlooked single and widowed elderly male. Robert L. Rubinstein suggests that these men must be viewed as individuals and it is this approach which colors the presentation of his research findings. He shows how older men find enjoyment in life using personal and social resources and existing opportunities.

Life, Death, and the Western Way of War traces when and how western soldiers-once regarded as simple fighting tools-became the far less expendable beings that we know today. In Kant's terms, the study traces the process through which soldiers have been turned from mere military means into ends in themselves. The book argues that such a major transformation is largely the result of a shift in the social meaning ascribed to soldiers' death. It suggests that looking at death can somehow provide a privileged angle to understanding the value that societies attach to life. The narrative emerging from the empirical evidence will show that the story of attitudes towards soldiers' death is the story of a gradual, increasing process of individualization in the social meaning attached to human loss in war. Such a development, which took centuries to emerge in full, was neither simple nor linear. It was a process that the state was temporarily able to frame in the collective narrative of the nation, but which ultimately has seen the increasing importance of the life of the individual soldier. In tracing the process through which soldiers have been turned from an amorphous collective into distinct individuals, this book shows how the emphasis on the primacy of the individual has further eroded the effectiveness of western warfare as an instrument of foreign policy. In particular, the modern, liberal conception of the soldier has had the unintended consequence of jeopardizing the Clausewitzian relationship between military means and political ends.

The contributors to Passages and Afterworlds explore death and its rituals across the Caribbean, drawing on ethnographic theories shaped by a deep understanding of the region's long history of violent encounters, exploitation, and cultural diversity. Examining the relationship between living bodies and the spirits of the dead, the contributors investigate the changes in cosmologies and rituals in the cultural sphere of death in relation to political developments, state violence, legislation, policing, and identity politics. Contributors address topics that range from the ever-evolving role of divinized spirits in Haiti and the contemporary mortuary practice of Indo-Trinidadians to funerary ceremonies in rural Jamaica and ancestor cults in Maroon culture in Suriname. Questions of alterity, difference, and hierarchy underlie these discussions of how racial, cultural, and class differences have been deployed in ritual practice and how such rituals have been governed in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean. Contributors. Donald Cosentino, Maarit Forde, Yanique Hume, Paul Christopher Johnson, Aisha Khan, Keith E. McNeal, George Mentore, Richard Price, Karen Richman, Ineke (Wilhelmina) van Wetering, Bonno (H.U.E.) Thoden van Velzen

Social media is full of dead people. Nobody knows precisely how many Facebook profiles belong to dead users but in 2012 the figure was estimated at 30 million. What do we do with all these digital souls? Can we simply delete them, or do they have a right to persist? Philosophers have been almost entirely silent on the topic, despite their perennial focus on death as a unique dimension of human existence. Until now. Drawing on ongoing philosophical debates, Digital Souls claims that the digital dead are objects that should be treated with loving regard and that we have a moral duty towards. Modern technology helps them to persist in various ways, while also making them vulnerable to new forms of exploitation and abuse. This provocative book explores a range of questions about the nature of death, identity, grief, the moral status of digital remains and the threat posed by AI-driven avatars of dead people. In the digital era, it seems we must all re-learn how to live with the dead.

Fear of accidents or acts of terror, illness or dying, loneliness or grief - if you're like most people such anxieties may be robbing you of the peace that could be yours. In Be Not Afraid, Johann Christoph Arnold, a seasoned pastoral counselor who has accompanied many people to death's door, tells how ordinary men, women and children found the strength to conquer their deepest fears. Drawing on stories of people he has known as pastor, relative or friend, Arnold shows how suffering can be given meaning, and despair overcome. Interspersed with anecdotes from such wise teachers as Mother Teresa, Henri Nouwen, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Arnold's words offer the assurance that even in an age of anxiety, you can live life to the full and meet death with confidence.

In the early nineteenth century, body snatching was rife because the only corpses available for medical study were those of hanged murderers. With the Anatomy Act of 1832, however, the bodies of those who died destitute in workhouses were appropriated for dissection. At a time when such a procedure was regarded with fear and revulsion, the Anatomy Act effectively rendered dissection a punishment for poverty. Providing both historical and contemporary insights, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute opens rich new prospects in history and history of science. The new afterword draws important parallels between social and medical history and contemporary concerns regarding organs for transplant and human tissue for research.

What obituaries tell us about our culture, past and present

"Within the short period of a year she was a bride, a beloved wife and companion, a mother, a corpse," reported "The National Intelligencer" on the death of Elizabeth Buchanan in 1838.

Such obituaries fascinate us. Few of us realize that, when examined historically, they can reveal not only information about the departed but also much about American culture and about who and what we value. They also offer hints about the way Americans view death.

This book also will fascinate, for it surveys more than 8,000 newspaper obituaries from 1818 to 1930 to show what they reveal about our culture. It shows how, in memorializing individual citizens, obituaries make a public expression of our values. Far from being staid or morbid, these death notices offer a lively look at a changing America. Indeed, obits are little windows through which to view America's cultural history.

In the nineteenth century, they spoke of a person's character, in the twentieth of a person's work and wealth. In the days when women were valued mainly in their relationships with men, their obituaries were about the men in their lives. Then, as now, important friendships make a difference, for sometimes a death has been deemed newsworthy only because of whom the deceased knew.

In 1838 when a 50-year-old Virginian named William P. Custis died "after a long and wasting illness," readers of "The Daily National Intelligencer" learned about his generous hospitality, his sterling business principles, and his kindness as a neighbor and husband. Custis's obituary not only recorded the fact of his death but also celebrated his virtues.

The newspaper obituary has a commemorative role. It distills the essence of a citizen's life, and it reflects what society values and wants to remember about the deceased. Throughout our history, these published accounts have revealed changing values. They provide a link between public remembrances of individuals and the collective memory of a great American past. In obits of yesteryear men were brave, gallant, vigilant, bold, honest, and dutiful. Women were patient, resigned, obedient, affectionate, amiable, pious, gentle, virtuous, tender, and useful.

Mining newspapers of New York City, New Orleans, Baltimore, Chicago, and San Francisco, along with two early national papers, "Niles' Weekly Register" and "The National Intelligencer," Janice Hume has produced a portrait of America, an entertaining history, and a revealing look at the things Americans have valued.

Janice Hume is an assistant professor at the A. Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Kansas State University.

In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials - to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism - have dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now less the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death. In "Memorial Mania", Erika Doss argues that these memorials underscore our obsession with issues of memory and history, and the urgent desire to express - and claim - those issues in visibly public contexts. Doss shows how this desire to memorialize the past disposes itself to individual anniversaries and personal grievances, to stories of tragedy and trauma, and to the social and political agendas of diverse numbers of Americans. By offering a framework for understanding these sites, Doss engages the larger issues behind our culture of commemoration. Driven by heated struggles over identity and the politics of representation, Memorial Mania is a testament to the fevered pitch of public feelings in America today.

Suicide in African Americans

As the twentieth century began, Black and white southerners alike dealt with low life expectancy and poor healthcare in a region synonymous with early death. But the modernization of death care by a diverse group of actors changed not only death rituals but fundamental ideas about health and wellness. Kristine McCusker charts the dramatic transformation that took place when southerners in particular and Americans in general changed their thinking about when one should die, how that death could occur, and what decent burial really means. As she shows, death care evolved from being a community act to a commercial one where purchasing a purple coffin and hearse ride to the cemetery became a political statement and the norm. That evolution also required interactions between perfect strangers, especially during the world wars as families searched for their missing soldiers. In either case, being put away decent, as southerners called burial, came to mean something fundamentally different in 1955 than it had just fifty years earlier.

In "Four Funerals and a Wedding," Smolowe jostles preconceptions about caregiving, defies cliches about losing loved ones, and reveals a stunning bottom line: far from being uncommon, resilience like hers is the norm among the recently bereaved. With humor and quiet wisdom, and with a lens firmly trained on what helped her tolerate and rebound from so much sorrow, she offers answers to questions we all confront in the face of loss, and reminds us that grief is not only about endings--it's about new beginnings.

Like all poets, inspired by death, Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ears tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. In these twelve essays is the voice of both witness and functionary. Lynch stands between 'the living and the living who have dies' with the same outrage and amazement, straining for the same glimpse we all get of what mortality means to a vital species. So here is homage to parents who have died and to children who shouldn't have. Here are golfers tripping over grave-markers, gourmands and hypochondriacs, lovers and suicides. These are essays of rare elegance and grace, full of fierce compassion and rich in humour and humanity - lessons taught to the living by the dead.

A demographic analysis of suicide rates among American and Canadian Indians. Lester examines the validity of statistical information finding a higher suicide incidence than current figures present, discussing general patterns, causes, psychological and sociological factors, suicide rates in differen

The living and the dead cohabited Paris until the late eighteenth century, when, in the name of public health, measures were taken to drive the latter from the city. Cemeteries were removed from urban space, and corpses started to be viewed as terrifyingly noxious substances.The dead had fallen victim to a sustained new reflection on the notions of life and death that emerged from the two new medical fields of biology and hygiene. In large part, the Paris of the nineteenth century-the Paris of modernity-arose, both theoretically and physically, out of this concern over the relations between the animate and the inanimate.As the dead became a source of pervasive and intense anxiousness, they also became an object of fascination that at once exceeded and guided the medical imagination attempting to control them. Human Remains examines that exuberant anxiety to discover the irrational, indeed erotic, forces motivating the medicalization of death.Working across a broad range of disciplines, including history, literature, the visual arts, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, the book seeks to understand the meaning of the dead and their role in creating one of the most important cities of the contemporary world.

Death is inevitable, but our perspectives about death and dying are socially constructed. This updated third edition takes us through the maze of issues, both social and personal, which surround death and dying in Canada. Topics include euthanasia and medically assisted death, palliative care and hospices, the high incidence of opioid deaths, the impact of cyber bullying in suicide deaths, the sociology of HIV/AIDS, funeral and burial practices, the high rates of suicide in Canada and dealing with grief and bereavement, among others. Additionally, Auger explores alternative methods for helping dying persons and their loved ones deal with death in a holistic, patient-centred way. Each chapter includes suggested readings, discussion questions and in-class assignments.

What drives a person to take his or her own life? Why would an individual be willing to strap a bomb to himself and walk into a crowded marketplace, blowing himself up at the same time as he kills and maims the people around him? Does suicide or voluntary death have the same meaning today as it had in earlier centuries, and does it have the same significance in China, India and the Middle East as it has in the West? How should we understand this distressing, often puzzling phenomenon and how can we explain its patterns and variations over time? In this wide-ranging comparative study, Barbagli examines suicide as a socio-cultural, religious and political phenomenon, exploring the reasons that underlie it and the meanings it has acquired in different cultures throughout the world. Drawing on a vast body of research carried out by historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and psychologists, Barbagli shows that a satisfactory theory of suicide cannot limit itself to considering the two causes that were highlighted by the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim namely, social integration and regulation. Barbagli proposes a new account of suicide that links the motives for and significance attributed to individual actions with the people for whom and against whom individuals take their lives. This new study of suicide sheds fresh light on the cultural differences between East and West and greatly increases our understanding of an often-misunderstood act. It will be the definitive history of suicide for many years to come.