A Place on Earth: Ritual, Grief, & Mourning as an Atheist, Part 5
Part V: A Place Apart “Tomorrow’s our last day,” Kristi said as she sat smoking on the balcony the night after our foray to Typhoon Lagoon. I wrapped my hair in […]
Tag Archives: death
A Place on Earth: Ritual, Grief, & Mourning as an Atheist, Part IV
Part IV: The Waters That Divide Us When I was five, my father—no doubt exhausted from days of dragging a small child around over-stimulating amusement parks—introduced what he called “hotel days,” […]
A Place on Earth: Ritual, Grief, & Mourning as an Atheist, Part 3
Part III: Radical Maps Talking about “mourning as an atheist” presses upon nuanced nerves. There is no singular “atheist” approach to rupture, no ritual towards which we turn in the aftermath […]
A Place on Earth: Ritual, Grief, & Mourning as an Atheist, Part 2
This is the second part in a series. Read Part 1 here. On Firmer Ground My earliest memories of Disney World aren’t so much of it as a tangible place, […]
A Place on Earth: Ritual, Grief, & Mourning as an Atheist, Part 1
Part I: As They Are, As They Should Be The moment the seatbelt sign turned off, I began pressing the call button for the flight attendant. A statuesque blonde bounded […]
Grappling with Comfort & Death as a Humanist
Recently, I heard a story about a man who is in prison and has been denied a request to have doctors help him end his life. (This is in Belgium […]
3 Men, 3 Trains, 3 Deaths: The QPR Method for Suicide Response
Its Monday, and I have just found a seat on Caltrain for the morning commute. It is common for trains to be delayed. But my heart sinks every time passengers are informed to expect a delay of […]
Tending to the Demise: Book Review of ‘Being Mortal’
In America, and indeed worldwide, death is an abstract that lingers at the periphery of waking life until its reality comes crashing down. Though many of us see depictions of […]
A Note on Dealing with Death & Dying, Trauma & Tragedy
At a recent workshop on ‘Trauma in Everyday Life,’ a psychologist spoke about big ‘T’ and little ‘t’ trauma. Big ‘T’ trauma is what we commonly refer to when speaking […]
Death is Not the End: How Humanists Can Think About the ‘Afterlife’
I believe in the human spirit. When I say “spirit”, I really mean “spirits”. And when I say “spirits”, I really mean what you might think of as “ghosts”. Not […]
Applied Sentience 