Inventing Afterlives – The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Life

Columbia University Press

Inventing AfterlivesThe Stories We Tell Ourselves About Life After Death\nAuthor(s): Regina M. Janes\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Columbia University Press, United States\nImprint: Columbia University Press\nISBN-13: 9780231185714, 978-0231185714\nSynopsis\nWhy is belief in an afterlife so persistent across times and cultures? And how can it coexist with disbelief in an afterlife? Most modern thinkers hold that afterlife belief serves such important psychological and social purposes as consoling survivors, enforcing morality, dispensing justice, or giving life meaning. Yet the earliest, and some more recent, afterlives strikingly fail to satisfy those needs.\n\nIn Inventing Afterlives, Regina M. Janes proposes a new theory of the origins of the hereafter rooted in the question that a dead body raises: where has the life gone? Humans then and now, in communities and as individuals, ponder what they would want or experience were they in that body. From this endlessly recurring situat.