Death: Religion, Philosophy, Law

Profound meditations on human life always confront its perhaps most baffling feature: death. We will study human mortality from a variety of perspectives, highlighting the powerful implications of death for the living. These include religious perspectives, with their paradox of the quest of mortal beings for the infinite, as well as of life after death; philosophical perspectives, with their insistence on confronting death for an authentic life; legal perspectives, with their enforcement of the intent of the deceased in the lives of survivors. That “our little life is rounded with a sleep” (Shakespeare) will be our central mystery.