Death & Beyond

"Andrew Greeley confronts death boldly in the context of life both before and after its ever-threatening fact. He never questions death's reality but he demolishes its consequences. Armed with enduring human and Christian hope, he insists: 'We can look forward to both continuity and discontinuity; continuity of life but extraordinary transformation of the quality, the intensity, the richness, the splendor of life. It sounds like quite a show.' Says Father Greeley: 'We are born with two incurable diseases, life -- always fatal -- and hope -- never curable.' Accepting the fact that it is impossible to prove that there is life after death in any empirical or scientific fashion, he nonetheless insists that to hope for it and to believe in it is not therefore irrational. He then searches human experience, history, literature, culture, sociology, science (including the so-called 'wonder sciences') and religion for evidence of belief and hope in continuiing life. Without ever abandoning his social scientist's objective stance, he makes a compelling -- even eloquent -- brief for the case that such hope is indeed highly rational."--front flap.