The Last Passage: Recovering a Death of Our Own - Hardcover

Heinz, Donald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195116437 ISBN 13: 9780195116434

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Is death merely the cessation of life? Are our final years simply a wearing out of the body? Are hospitals and funeral homes--the bureaucratic machinery of death--capable of handling the profound spiritual dimension of dying?
In The Last Passage, Donald Heinz offers wise answers to these questions in a book that urges us to "recover a death of our own" and to view our final years as a fulfillment, a "last career." Despite the recent spate of books on death and dying, death remains a fact our culture tries desperately to ignore. In other times and in other cultures, preparing for death was seen as an important spiritual task--perhaps the most important task of our lives. Heinz argues that we can reconceive of death, reinvest it with meaning, and save it from becoming a meaningless biological event. Seeking appropriate models for such a reconstruction, Heinz offers a fascinating overview of the many ways death has been envisioned and ritualized throughout human history, from the Tibetan Book of the Dead to 15th century Christian ars moriendi--manuals on the art of dying--and from Jean Paul Sartre to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. He also surveys the more recent contributions of psychologists, anthropologists, cultural critics, and death awareness advocates, whose efforts have largely failed to integrate death into a larger human story and the larger human community.
Finally, Heinz shows us how we might create rituals through the use of music, visual arts, dance, drama, and language that would enable us to approach death with reverence, as the spiritual consummation of our lives.

About this title

About the Author

Donald Heinz is Dean, College of Humanities and Fine Arts, California State University, Chico. He lives in Chico, California.

Reviews

Heinz, dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at California State University, provides a provocative though somewhat effusive examination of death practices in a religious, historical, anthropological, and mythological context. He criticizes contemporary American views of death, wherein old age is seen as a curable ailment and the topic of death avoided. Our unimaginative, spiritually impoverished death system, Heinz argues, begets a shallow, dispirited existence. Through revitalization of ritual within the context of community and religion, we can bring hope and renewed meaning to our deaths. Heinz admits that his own Christian beliefs color his discussion, but he compensates by devoting ample consideration to other religious traditions. In conclusion, he looks to music, the visual arts, dance, theater, and language to help invigorate the connection between the living and the dead. This scholarly analysis includes a rich bibliography and is recommended for all libraries.?Annette Haines, Central Michigan Univ. Libs., Mount Pleasant
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195116437
• ISBN 13: 9780195116434
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320