Alan Moore’s “Grandeur & Monstrosity”

Any readers intrigued by the mostly inchoate phenomenon that I optimistically refer to as Poetic Faith – the notion and practice of creating one’s own religion, as a work of art – should track down Alan Moore’s story Grandeur & Monstrosity, which appears in the graphic narrative anthology “God is Dead: the Book of Acts; … Read moreAlan Moore’s “Grandeur & Monstrosity”

“On ‘Choosing Suicide’: Documentary as Confrontation”

In the following article, originally published in the Summer 1980 edition of Television Quarterly, documentarian Richard Ellison describes the production of his highly controversial special “Choosing Suicide”. The documentary was produced at the request of its subject, Brooklyn-based artist and psychotherapist Jo Roman, who had decided to end her own life after receiving a terminal … Read more“On ‘Choosing Suicide’: Documentary as Confrontation”

An Online Symposium Celebrating 50 Years of “The Denial of Death”, With Caitlin Doughty & Sheldon Solomon

I’m looking forward to attending this upcoming online symposium, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death. Published in 1973, the book helped spark the Happy Death Movement, a clear precursor to the current Death Positivity Movement. The event will be moderated by D.S. Moss and will feature speakers … Read moreAn Online Symposium Celebrating 50 Years of “The Denial of Death”, With Caitlin Doughty & Sheldon Solomon

“One life: imagining a radical acceptance of death”

My new article for OnlySky explores the philosophy of radical death acceptance via the nontheistic religion of Cavesword imagined in Gore Vidal’s 1954 novel Messiah, tracing the concept back to the garden-school of Epicurus and then to the bohemian counter-culture surrounding the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: The humanist point of view is centered on the … Read more“One life: imagining a radical acceptance of death”

“Will I Go Gentle?”

Dale McGowan writes for OnlySky, the new secular/Humanist multimedia platform, on the vexing question of “what is it like to die?”: There are ways to diminish the fear of death and dying. Epicurus may have been the first to formally note that our existence is bounded by symmetrical eternities. We fear the eternity of nonexistence … Read more“Will I Go Gentle?”