Mariam Vahradyan writes for Psyche: Many cultures around the world actively maintain relationships with the dead through storytelling, prayer and ritual. In Japan, for example, the spirits of the dead are welcomed during the Obon festival. For four days each year, families remember their ancestors by tending to graves, lighting small fires, and making offerings. … Read more“Why you should talk to your dead ancestors”
Sally Hayden writes for the Literary Hub: The road wound upwards, past a sloping graveyard and cedar trees. We passed another hamlet of houses, and I started to spot various signs pointing towards the drifting post. Through a final flurry of trees, it at last became visible. There was a rectangular yellow post box—the “real” … Read more“Mail Between Heaven and Earth: On Japan’s Post Office For Letters to the Dead”
Elaina Plott Calobro write for The Atlantic on the state of play in Canada, ten years after legalizing medical aid in dying: The details of the assisted-death experience have become a preoccupation of Canadian life. Patients meticulously orchestrate their final moments, planning celebrations around them: weekend house parties before a Sunday-night euthanasia in the garden; … Read more“Canada is Killing Itself”
Sophie Brickman writes for The Atlantic on the transformative power of The Muppets as she grieves her father: That changed after my father got sick last year, when my daily life became not just a logistical mire—managing therapy appointments, speaking with doctors—but also one of constant dread: about which Dad I’d find when I walked … Read more“Grief Counseling With Kermit”
Sam Dresser writes for Aeon: Two puny words shoulder a substantial, if diffuse, philosophical outlook: as if. Epicurus was perhaps the first to put this unexceptional construction to good use. He felt that life was about attaining whatever passing happiness we might find, while avoiding as much pain and suffering as we can. In neither … Read more“As If”
Michael Cholbi writes for Aeon: Freedom is a notoriously complex and contested philosophical notion, and I won’t pretend to settle any of the big controversies it raises. But I believe that a type of freedom we can call freedom over death – that is, a freedom in which we shape the timing and circumstances of … Read more“Freedom over death”
Adam Lee writes for OnlySky on the potential of New York becoming the eleventh US state to legalize Medical Assistance in Dying, and on the secular Humanist ethical underpinnings of MAID: If we have a freedom, we can choose how to exercise it. That choice necessarily includes the right not to exercise it. Freedom of … Read more“The Future of Dying”
Alexis Shotwell writes for Psyche on Ursula K. LeGuin’s practical philosophy:
The Two Dudes Philosophy YouTube channel offers a cogent summary and analysis of Ernest Becker’s “Denial of Death” thesis.
Thomas Moynihan writes for the BBC on a novel immortality project proposed by the English historian and freethinker Frederic Harrison in 1890: With posterity on his mind, Harrison decided to write an article titled “A Pompeii for the Twenty-Ninth Century”. Leaping off from a forecast that London may one day be as “desolate” as the … Read more“If a Victorian historian had his way, there’d be a giant time capsule under Stonehenge”