Description

In the earlier clays human beings were universally supposed to have three experiences: religion, marriage and death. In modern times all are not

religious; all don’t accept the need for marriage; the only constant seems to be death however, even death is experienced in many different ways. This book explores the varied understandings and approaches to death it is no i more a tabooed subject as it was in days not too long ago in some important traditions of the world.

For individuals with a truly religious conscience and in traditional, popular religion, death was always present. Western culture invented the war against death. Ii has been a war of liquidation and elimination, supported by technical, clinical, and scientific progress. Until the western proclamation of this war, death was a mystery, but a mystery of the manifold aspects of life. Today, in western society, where death, as Wittgenstein puts it, is not a life event, it is no longer a mystery, but a problem to solve.

The author has put his vision on death in this book in an enriching way and reading this book will be one of the joys of life

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas Mooren, born in 1947 in Dortmund-Kurl, is Professor of History of Religions and Missiology at the Institute of Mission Studies at St. Paul University, Ottawa, Ont. (Canada), member of the School of Graduate Studies and Research, University of Ottawa. He is also an active member of the European Academy of Science and Arts. Prof. Mooren, who has studied Theology, the History of Religions and Anthropology, as well as Arabic, Indonesian and Sanskrit, has published numerous studies on missiology, Islamic monotheism, and the dialogue with the non-Christian religions. He is one of the authors of On the Border- The otherness of God and the Multiplicity of the Religions, Frankfurt, Hern, New York, Paris (Lang) 1994.

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE

The Skull and the Name: Death and Dying in Traditional Cultures

1. Death and the Animal

2. The bad Death

3. The mirroring of death: the Kwaio Ritual

4. Other Anti-death Strategies; Death and pollution; Death and Initiation

5. Death: Continuity and Discontinuity

6. The Climb to Eternity: the Fataleka

Way of Dying

PART TWO

Freedom beyond Skull and Name: Hinduism and the Symbiosis of Life and Death

1. Death and the Way of Ritual

2. Death as Borderline and Expression of Dharma: Prajapati and Brahma

3. The Soul and Its Migrations: the Contribution of Indian Tribal Religions to Classical Hinduism

4. The Karmic Fact

5. Death as Liberator; Living the Death state

6. The Moralization of Death

7. Death and Dying in Modern Hindu Thought

PART THREE

Golgotha, the Place of the Skull: Death and Dying in Christianity

1. The Weighing of the Heart

2. Yahveh’s Holiness

3. From Martyrdom to Purgatory

4. The Secularization of Death

5. The Puritan Way of Death and its End

6. Conclusion: The Law of Exchange;

Death and Dying Today

Epilogue

Bibliography