Philosophy

“Reimagine Life, Loss and Love” – an Online Festival Exploring Death and Celebrating Life (May 1 – July 9, 2020)

For the past two years the non-profit Reimagine organization has been staging annual, city-wide life- and death-affirming festivals in San Francisco and NYC. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Reimagine has canceled the planned NYC festival and pivoted to organizing a two-month long, international online event. Reimagine Life, Loss and Love (May 1 – July … Read more“Reimagine Life, Loss and Love” – an Online Festival Exploring Death and Celebrating Life (May 1 – July 9, 2020)

Make Your Own Memento Mori: Befriending Death with Art, History and the Imagination with Morbid Anatomy Founder Joanna Ebenstein

In July 2020 Joanna Ebenstein will be offering an 8-hour online course in the history, mystery and art of the memento mori: Death is the great mystery of human life. Each of us – barring some medical miracle – will die. Foreknowledge of our own death is a defining characteristic of humanity; the ancient Greeks … Read moreMake Your Own Memento Mori: Befriending Death with Art, History and the Imagination with Morbid Anatomy Founder Joanna Ebenstein

Death, Redesigned

This excellent longform article by Jon Mooallem is unfortunately no longer available via the California Sunday Magazine, so I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing the text here. There’s an ugliness — an inelegance — to death that Paul Bennett gradually came to find unacceptable. It seems to offend him the way a clumsy, counterintuitive kitchen tool might, or a … Read moreDeath, Redesigned

“Creating Countercultural Memento Mori”

In collaboration with the good people at Reimagine’s Life, Loss and Love Festival, I will be giving an illustrated Zoom presentation on this theme on the evening of May 6th. Here’s the presentation description: “Remember death and therefore seize the day!” It’s an ancient and profoundly simple philosophy, but how can members of the emerging … Read more“Creating Countercultural Memento Mori”