In this edited collection of essays, professionals and academics from across the spectrum of the humanities and social sciences outline the ways in which Generative Death Anxiety theory impacts their field and discuss the work of its most famous proponent, Ernest Becker, whose DEGREESIDenial of Death DEGREESR won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. The essays demonstrate that recognition of this deeply rooted source of human behavior and attitudes provides a fertile organizing principle for the humanities and social sciences.

The theory of Generative Death Anxiety is based on the recognition that if there is any uniquely human characteristic, it is the ability to anticipate and prepare for death. This recognition of mortality, however, runs directly counter to our survival instincts and must be repressed, thus creating a constant supply of repressed psychic energy--which, shaped by cultural and narrative factors, emerges in a rich array of human creativity and resourcefulness, but also in racism, religious chauvinism, reactive violence, and other types of pathological behavior. In this edited collection of essays, professionals and academics from across the spectrum of the humanities and social sciences outline the ways in which this theory impacts their field and discuss the work of its most famous proponent, Ernest Becker, whose DEGREESIDenial of Death DEGREESR won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. The essays demonstrate that recognition of this deeply rooted source of human behavior and attitudes provides a fertile organizing principle for the humanities and social sciences.

Exploring a new approach to interfaith/interreligious communication, the contributors to this collection seek to interact from the perspective of their own tradition or academic discipline with Ernest Becker's theory on the relationship between religion, culture and the human awareness of death and mortality. While much interfaith/interreligious dialogue focuses on beliefs and practices, thus delineating areas of disagreement as a starting point, these chapters foster interactive communication rooted in areas of the universal human experience. Thus by demonstration these authors argue for the integrity and efficacy of this approach for pursuing intercultural and interdisciplinary communication.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) was an astute observer of society and human behavior during America's turbulent 1960s and 1970s. Trained in social anthropology and driven by a transcending curiosity about human motivations, Becker doggedly pursued his basic research question, "What makes people act the way they do?" Dissatisfied with what he saw as narrowly fragmented methods in the contemporary social sciences and impelled by a belief that humankind more than ever needed a disciplined, rational, and empirically based understanding of itself, Becker slowly created a powerful interdisciplinary vision of the human sciences, one in which each discipline is rooted in a basic truth concerning the human condition. That truth became an integral part of Becker's emerging social science. Almost inadvertently, he outlined a perspective on human motivations that is perhaps the most broadly interdisciplinary to date. His perspective traverses not only the biological, psychological, and social sciences but also the humanities and educational, political, and religious studies. Ernest Becker is best known for the books written in the last few years before his death from cancer, including the highly praised Pulitzer Prize-winning volume The Denial of Death (1974) and Escape from Evil (1975). These late works, however, were built on a distinguished body of earlier books, essays, and reviews. The power and strength of Becker's ideas are fully present in his early works, which underlie his later contributions and give direction for interpreting the development of his ideas. Although Ernest Becker's life and career were cut short, his major writings have remained continually in print and have captured the interest of subsequent generations of readers. The Ernest Becker Reader makes available for the first time in one volume much of Becker's early work and thus places his later work in proper context. It is a major contribution to the ongoing interest in Becker's ideas.

As the author views it, the desire for religious and spiritual commitment remains strong in North American and European post-Christian society, although now free to take many forms both inside and outside the churches. Drawing on the anthropological work of Ernest Becker, Liechty suggests that by understanding such desire as a result of our human ability to anticipate our own death, we can see both why this urge is unquenched by modernity and make sense of the myriad pathways and channels of expression it has taken in our time.

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