Description
Book SynopsisRegina M. Janes proposes a new theory of the origins of the hereafter. Drawing on a variety of religious traditions and contemporary literature and film as well as cognitive science and evolutionary psychology,
Inventing Afterlives shows that in asking what happens after we die we define the worlds we inhabit and the values by which we live.
Trade ReviewThis engaging and thought-provoking book has a capacious range that includes those who believe there is no afterlife and spans time from the ancient Greeks and Egyptians to our current scientific, psychological, and religious thinking about what we imagine—or hope—happens after death. -- Paula R. Backscheider, Philpott Stevens Eminent Scholar, Auburn University
Regina Janes has written a brilliant, inquisitive, polymath essay to explain why the afterlife required inventing and what the results may show about the diversity and consistency of human nature. For adventurous wit on a forbidding terrain, this book has no precedent and will allow no imitator. -- David Bromwich, Yale University
Inventing Afterlives is an intensively researched and brilliant book. The question of what humans have made of the afterlife is fascinating and Janes, who knows more about this subject than any scholar living (or, dare I say it, dead), has achieved something like completeness in her survey of the material. -- Blakey Vermeule, Stanford University
Regina Janes’
Inventing Afterlives is a breezy but well-informed romp through the ages as cultures from those of primitive humans to those of the digital age do what the title of this manuscript states, invent afterlives, telling their members what to expect, or, as in our own age, telling them what cannot happen even if the space or site of the afterlife gives writers a perfect setting to stage righteous justice or cynical evasion. -- Daniel T. O'Hara, Temple University
There is no doubt that Janes’ book will be of interest to scholars of religion, particularly those who focus on the areas of death and immortality studies, religion and literature, and religion and popular culture since it contains a cache of literary and cinematic references. -- Cynthia A. Hogan * Reading Religion *
This book, which travels time and disciplines, cannot be ignored. Scholars and students of sociology, anthropology, religion, and cultural history will find
Inventing Afterlives particularly useful for developing new approaches to conceptualizing and interrogating beliefs in the hereafter. Janes’s study strips away theological and anachronistic understandings about belief in life after death, leaving us with a productive framework with which to question the validity of both our own assumptions about the afterlife and those of other scholars. -- Camille Grace Leon Angelo * Religious Theory *
Table of ContentsPreface
1. Concerning the Present State of Life After Death
2. Impermanent Eternities: Egypt, Sumer and Babylon, Ancient Israel, Greece, and Rome
3. Touring Asian Afterlives: Eternal Impermanence
4. Pursuing Happiness: How the Enlightenment Invented an Afterlife to Wish For
5.
Wandâfuru Raifu or
Afterlife Inventions and Variations
Notes
Index
