{"product_id":"life-of-the-world-to-come-neardeath-experience-and-christian-hope-the-albert-cardinal-meyer-lectures-9780195103359","title":"Life of the World to Come: Near-Death Experience and Christian Hope: The Albert Cardinal Meyer Lectures","description":"\u003cp\u003eCritics of religion have argued that Christianitys success stems from its promise of eternal life  that people become Christian at bottom merely to cope with their fear of death. Contemporary theologians and philosophers  highly sensitive to this charge  tend to skirt the issue of life after death. To speak of the afterlife is at best to engage in wishful thinking  at worst to descend to the level of pop religion  encounters with angels  and UFO abductions. In The Life of the World to Come  however  Carol Zaleski asks the question  \"Are we rationally and morally entitled to believe in life after death?\" and answers with a spirited and emphatic \"yes.\" Drawing on a rich and varied array of sources ranging from Plato to St. Augustine to Heidegger  from the samurai warrior code to New Yorker cartoons to conversations with her young son  Zaleski not only brilliantly defends the right of Christians to believe in a life after death  but she illuminates the real value of imagining what that life might be like. It is important to spiritual maturity  she says  for the believer to be able to imagine a state of complete fulfillment  of oneness with God. And a vision of the ideal society  the heavenly communion of saints  is essential to the ordering of both our own lives and the society in which we live. Zaleski organizes her defense into three parts corresponding to the three great hours of the Divine Office  the cycle of prayers that is the heart of monastic life: Lauds at dawns first light  Vespers at twilight  and  with the coming of night  Compline. In this liturgy of darkness and light  sleeping and waking  Zaleski discovers a poignant awareness of the ever-presentness of death in life and life in death  an awareness that we sadly miss amidst the medical and technological wonders of modern life. The timeless prayers and rituals of classical Christianity  she finds  are not a distraction from life  but a way of orienting oneself to life. Zaleski stresses the importance of the testimony of near-death experiences for Christian thinking about the afterlife. While these experiences do not by themselves provide objective evidence of life after death  she says  neither should they be dismissed as wishful thinking merely because research shows them to be influenced by cultural expectations. Zaleski asks \"If God  the unknowable  wishes to be known  what other recourse does God have but to avail himself of our images and symbols  just as he has availed himself of our flesh?\" This book will inspire  challenge and console readers seeking to confront their own hopes and fears of death and the afterlife with dignity  rather than despair or denial. Candid  surprising  and profoundly wise  it will fascinate anyone intrigued by the strange and wonderful phenomena of near-death experience and the beauty and mystery of the unknown.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45647085010997,"sku":"ByrdShop_0195103351","price":34.07,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780195103359.jpg?v=1781688338","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/life-of-the-world-to-come-neardeath-experience-and-christian-hope-the-albert-cardinal-meyer-lectures-9780195103359","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}