After September 11, with New Yorkers reeling from the World Trade Center attack, Chief Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch proclaimed that his staff would do more than confirm the identity of the individuals who were killed. They would attempt to identify and return to families every human body part recovered from the site that was larger than a thumbnail. As Jay D. Aronson shows, delivering on that promise proved to be a monumentally difficult task. Only 293 bodies were found intact. The rest would be painstakingly collected in 21,900 bits and pieces scattered throughout the skyscrapers’ debris. This massive effort—the most costly forensic investigation in U.S. history—was intended to provide families conclusive knowledge about the deaths of loved ones. But it was also undertaken to demonstrate that Americans were dramatically different from the terrorists who so callously disregarded the value of human life. Bringing a new perspective to the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, Who Owns the Dead? tells the story of the recovery, identification, and memorialization of the 2,753 people killed in Manhattan on 9/11. For a host of cultural and political reasons that Aronson unpacks, this process has generated endless debate, from contestation of the commercial redevelopment of the site to lingering controversies over the storage of unclaimed remains at the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The memory of the victims has also been used to justify military activities in the Middle East that have led to the deaths of an untold number of innocent civilians.

This book explores the controversial dilemmas which meet at the intersection of medicine philosphy and law - questions concerning killing and not killing which are faced daily in health care. They embrace euthanasia abortion the care of the elderly and the demented the care of the mentally ill children and those in a persistent vegative state. Who Owns our Bodies? identifies a crisis both in ethics and in empowerment as people face often neccessarily wretched choices. It seeks a framework of guidance for practical decision-making and focuses on two key issues. First who decides on an individual's quality of life and thus on their health care treatments? Second how can patients be empowered with a structure to enable choice self-realization self-reflection and self-responsibility? John Spiers with characteristic clarity and verve offers a fundamental choice between health care experienced as hierarchy and control and the alternative of choice and self-responsibilty. He argues that health care must rely on patients deciding how much power they have not on professionals deciding how much to grant them.

A deeply compelling exploration of the death industry and the people—morticians, detectives, crime scene cleaners, embalmers, executioners—who work in it and what led them there. We are surrounded by death. It is in our news, our nursery rhymes, our true-crime podcasts. Yet from a young age, we are told that death is something to be feared. How are we supposed to know what we’re so afraid of, when we are never given the chance to look? Fueled by a childhood fascination with death, journalist Hayley Campbell searches for answers in the people who make a living by working with the dead. Along the way, she encounters mass fatality investigators, embalmers, and a former executioner who is responsible for ending sixty-two lives. She meets gravediggers who have already dug their own graves, visits a cryonics facility in Michigan, goes for late-night Chinese with a homicide detective, and questions a man whose job it is to make crime scenes disappear. Through Campbell’s incisive and candid interviews with these people who see death every day, she asks: Why would someone choose this kind of life? Does it change you as a person? And are we missing something vital by letting death remain hidden? A dazzling work of cultural criticism, All the Living and the Dead weaves together reportage with memoir, history, and philosophy, to offer readers a fascinating look into the psychology of Western death.

Death has been pushed out of life and into a dark and lonely 'morgue'. North American's generally approach the topic of death with fear and denial in hand. When Death Speaks is all about changing the conversation to one of openness and inspiration. When Death Speaks approaches death with compassion, love and frankness, talking openly about death, planning for the inevitable, and supporting family and friends with tools and skills to begin a new type of conversation. The tools, information, and real life stories are all designed to offer a different perspective in dealing with death and loss. The practices offered are designed to use 'smaller deaths' as preparation for the death of our body. When Death Speaks is all about bringing death back to life.

Fifteen years ago, Dorion Cairns concluded an article on phenome nology with a cautious appraisal of its influence in America. "Thus far," he wrote, "it continues to be an exotic." The situation today has changed: translations of the writings of Husserl, Heidegger, Marcel, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty have appeared, and commentaries on these and related thinkers are not uncommon. Moreover, discussion of phenomenological problems is increasingly becoming part of the American (if not the British) philosophical scene. Phenomenology is in danger of domestication! Signs of its accommodation include a willingness to pay tribute to HusserI's Logical Investigations by those who find relatively little to interest them in his later work, a location of what are taken to be common themes and underlying convergences of emphasis in Continental phenomenology and Anglo-American philosophy of the more nearly Wittgensteinian and Austinian varieties, and a growing impatience (shared by some phenomenologists) with expositions, explications, and interpretations of Husserl's work at the expense of original applications of phenomenology. Most bluntly put, the attitude is: Don't talk about it; do it! It would seem that we have arrived at a point where introductions to phenomenology are of doubt ful value, if not superfluous. The present collection of essays is based on different assumptions and points to an alternative conception of the role of both methodology and originality in phenomenological work

There are no atheists in foxholes; or so we hear. The thought that the fear of death motivates religious belief has been around since the earliest speculations about the origins of religion. There are hints of this idea in the ancient world, but the theory achieves prominence in the works of Enlightenment critics and Victorian theorists of religion, and has been further developed by contemporary cognitive scientists. Why do people believe in gods? Because they fear death. Yet despite the abiding appeal of this simple hypothesis, there has not been a systematic attempt to evaluate its central claims and the assumptions underlying them. Do human beings fear death? If so, who fears death more, religious or nonreligious people? Do reminders of our mortality really motivate religious belief? Do religious beliefs actually provide comfort against the inevitability of death? In Death Anxiety and Religious Belief, Jonathan Jong and Jamin Halberstadt begin to answer these questions, drawing on the extensive literature on the psychology of death anxiety and religious belief, from childhood to the point of death, as well as their own experimental research on conscious and unconscious fear and faith. In the course of their investigations, they consider the history of ideas about religion's origins, challenges of psychological measurement, and the very nature of emotion and belief.

The only true and unedited telling of the life of Christ—his life and times, in historical context, but not lacking the psychology behind his physical being and spirit. Unlike other books seeking to strip Jesus' story to reveal only the human being, Romano Guardini's The Lord gives the complete story of Jesus Christ—as man, Holy Ghost, and Creator. Pope Benedict XVI lauds Guardini's work as providing a full understanding of the Son of God, away from the prejudice that rationality engenders. Put long-held myths aside and discover the entire truth about God's only begotten Son.

We all face death, but how many of us are actually ready for it? Whether our own death or that of a loved one comes first, how prepared are we, spiritually or practically? In Preparing to Die, Andrew Holecek presents a wide array of resources to help the reader address this unfinished business. Part One shows how to prepare one's mind and how to help others, before, during, and after death. The author explains how spiritual preparation for death can completely transform our relationship to the end of life, dissolving our fear and helping us to feel open and receptive to letting go in the dying process. Daily meditation practices, the stages of dying and how to work with them, and after-death experiences are all detailed in ways that will be particularly helpful for those with an interest in Tibetan Buddhism and in Tibetan approaches to conscious dying. Part Two addresses the practical issues that surround death. Experts in grief, hospice, the funeral business, and the medical and legal issues of death contribute chapters to prepare the reader for every practical concern, including advance directives, green funerals, the signs of death, warnings about the funeral industry, the stages of grief, and practical care for the dying. Part Three contains heart-advice from twenty of the best-known Tibetan Buddhist masters now teaching in the West. These brief interviews provide words of solace and wisdom to guide the dying and their caregivers during this challenging time. Preparing to Die is for anyone interested in learning how to prepare for death from a Buddhist perspective, both spiritually and practically. It is also for those who want to learn how to help someone else who is dying, both during the time of illness and death as well as after death.

A facsimile reprint of a 1945 report on the Northwest Indians, answering questions about who they are, what they eat, their housing, work, clothing, home life, government, religion, and status.