Facing Up to Mortality: Interfaith/Interreligious Explorations

187 Pages·2021·1.159 MB·English

by  Daniel Liechty

Facing Up to Mortality

Facing Up to Mortality
Interfaith/Interreligious
Explorations
Edited by Daniel Liechty
Foreword by J. Dana Trent
Contributions by Paul Cantz,
Jonathan Cohen, Spee Kosloff, Daniel
Liechty, David R. Loy, Anas Malik,
Merlyn E. Mowrey, Anantanand
Rambachan, and Sheldon Solomon
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Quote from Raymond Williams, “So, what are we professing here? Religion, the lib-
eral arts, and civic life,” in Reinventing Religious Studies: Key Writings in the History
of a Discipline, edited by Scott S. Elliott. London and New York: Routledge, 2014.
Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.
Quotes from THE DENIAL OF DEATH by Ernest Becker. Copyright © 1974 by The
Free Press. Copyright © renewed 2002 by Marie H. Becker. Reprinted with the permis-
sion of The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Quotes from ESCAPE FROM EVIL by Ernest Becker. Copyright © 1976 by Marie
Becker. Copyright © renewed 2003 by Marie H. Becker. Reprinted with the permission
of The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any elec-
tronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without
written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages
in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Liechty, Daniel, 1954– editor.
Title: Facing up to mortality : interfaith/interreligious explorations / edited by Daniel
Liechty ; foreword by J. Dana Trent ; contributions by Paul Cantz, Jonathan Cohen, Spee
Kosloff, Daniel Liechty, David R. Loy, Anas Malik, Merlyn E. Mowrey, Anantanand
Rambachan, and Sheldon Solomon.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references
and index. | Summary: “Late anthropologist Ernest Becker outlined a theory that a major
function of culture is to provide answers to the Big Questions people pose in relation to
the uniquely human recognition of death and mortality. . . .”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021038109 (print) | LCCN 2021038110 (ebook) | ISBN
9781793655424 (hardback) | ISBN 9781793655431 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Death—Religious aspects. | Death. | Mortality. | Becker, Ernest.
Classification: LCC BL504 .F33 2022 (print) | LCC BL504 (ebook) | DDC 202/.3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038109
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038110
ISBN 978-1-7936-5544-8 (paper : alk. paper)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
This collection is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Neil Elgee
(1926–2020), the Founding President of The Ernest Becker
Foundation. I only wish Neil could have held the book in his
hands before the end of his fruitfully ripe life on this earth.

Contents
Foreword ix
Introduction xiii
Daniel Liechty
Chapter One: God Is Sometimes Great! The Glory and Shame of
Religion 1
Sheldon Solomon and Spee Kosloff
Chapter Two: The Nature of Consciousness: A Nondual (Advaita)
Dialogue with Ernest Becker 27
Anantanand Rambachan
Chapter Three: Religion as Umbrella, Religion as Path: A Buddhist
Perspective on Death Denial and Life Transformation 45
David R. Loy
Chapter Four: L’Dor v’Dor: The Intergenerational Style of Hebraic
‘Immortality’ 59
Paul Cantz
Chapter Five: Heroism, Sacrifice, and Jewish Identity: Exploring
Rabbinic Readings of the Esther Story 73
Jonathan Cohen
Chapter Six: Naming Our Incompleteness: A Christian Encounter
with Ideas of Ernest Becker 89
Daniel Liechty
vii
viii Contents
Chapter Seven: Death, Self, and Political Survival in Islam and
Islamicate Contexts 113
Anas Malik
Chapter Eight: The Sacred Cosmos: Transcendence Without
Absolutism 135
Merlyn E. Mowrey
Index 153
About the Contributors 157
Foreword
I began to sit at the bedside of dying people when I was twenty-five years
old. It was an interfaith ‘baptism’ by fire for an intensive care unit chaplain,
a feverish learning, often by misstep and mistake, navigating religious,
theological, and ritualistic differences in the practices of death, dying, and
bereavement.
Each of my patients’ transition was unique, like stepping over the threshold
of homes ancient and modern, complex, and simple.
Not even a decade later, by a circuitous path, I taught my first World
Religions college course. By that time, interfaith and interreligious differ-
ences had come to my own home: I, an ordained Southern Baptist clergy-
woman, had married a devout Hindu who formerly served as a priest. By
that point, my husband and I had become more familiar with the national and
regional conversations of comparative religious studies, both in the realm of
life and of death. I started to see in my students what I saw in the hospital.
Let’s call it fluidity. Like my patients, my classes, and in my own marriage,
there wasn’t ‘just one way’ and one way only.
While the history of American interreligious and interfaith dialogue is
often said to have begun in the World’s Parliament of 1893, present conver-
sations are less rigid than their predecessors, particularly about death and
afterlife. From my patients to students to the public square, there seems to be
an evaporation of the urgency to adhere to a rigid doctrinal posture. Whether
facing certain death in a hospital bed or facilitating a classroom conversation
on mortality, rarely do I encounter the ‘just one way’ position that seemed to
be the staple during my own upbringing.
Where and how have we become more empathetic to varying religious,
spiritual, and faithful views of finitude and death? Perhaps it’s the shift of
the American religious landscape, now brimming with multifaith families,
ix