Humanist poet, speaker, organizer and ritualist Daniel Lev Shkolnik writes for Patheos on a self-devised memento mori/carpe diem rite: When I pass into a cemetery alone, a calm settles over me. I watch the hawks hunt from the pines. The hares dash through among the stones and the bones of slower hares. The puffball mushrooms … Read more“Dancing with the Dead: Two Techniques for Spiritual Rejuvenation”
Click here to read Sasha Sagan’s 2014 essay for The Cut: My parents taught me that even though it’s not forever — because it’s not forever — being alive is a profoundly beautiful thing for which each of us should feel deeply grateful. If we lived forever it would not be so amazing. In this video, Sasha … Read more“Lessons of Immortality and Mortality From My Father, Carl Sagan”
A sobering and urgent documentary on the challenges of living in the face of mass extinctions and climate catastrophe. For more on this subject, visit the Living in the Time of Dying website.
A concise presentation on the subject of mortality from the Epicurean philosophical perspective, from the Society of Friends of Epicurus.
Hua Su’s recent article for The New Yorker surveys the controversy surrounding public memorial statuary in the USA: That a monument seems to, in Farber’s words, “stop time,” helps explain why so many are eager to defend them from overzealous protesters. We’ve seen pictures of police flanking the Wall Street bull and armed civilians standing guard in front … Read moreThe New Monuments That America Needs
The Art of Dying Institute, an initiative of The Open Center, is dedicated to fostering an engaged community of practitioners, researchers & scholars, educators, front-line innovators, partners and investors to address the need for a cultural awakening around the theme of death and our mortality, how we die and the consequences for how we live. … Read moreThe Art of Dying Institute (New York City)
The UK-based FoLaD is: (…) a free ‘open source’ flexible scalable concept for people to share discussion, support, activities, experiences, and arts and entertainment, that enable us to advance ideas and actions for suicide awareness and prevention, to help people heal, and to improve how we all live. Much more on this initiative at the FoLaD website.
Coreopsis is the semi-annual journal of the Society for Ritual Arts: Our mission is to support the ritual arts community through the advancement of arts and scholarly research in the fields of spirituality, consciousness, healing, performance, and visual media. We support work that advances freedom of spiritual practices globally, the scientific study of spirituality and … Read moreCoreopsis: Rituals for Living and Dying
In her essay for lithub.com, Ara A. Francis contemplates the prescience of Lyn Loflin’s 1978 book The Craft of Dying, which catalogs the then-nascent “Happy Death Movement”: Lyn’s analysis of death activism read as though it could have been written yesterday, and I wondered how that could be. In light of the happy death movement’s ostensible … Read moreAn App to Remind You You’re Going to Die? On Death Positivity
My new essay is now available via the Morbid Anatomy Online Journal. The essay explores how and why the personification of Death has been re-imagined in recent decades, and how that reflects deep cultural shifts regarding the concept of mortality: At a cultural moment when the traditional imagery of the Grim Reaper had largely given … Read more“The Changing Face of Death: A Countercultural Perspective”