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A belief in spiritual destiny and the existence of the soul runs through Kafka’s dream chronicles. Similarly, a thematic treatment of the soul and its transmigrations figures in some of his fiction. Two short stories Kafka wrote in 1917--“The Bucket Rider” and “The Hunter Gracchus” deal with after-life experiences. To better understand Kafka’s eschatological viewpoint which is a component of his mystical life, this chapter examines the symbols and motifs used in these two stories to portray the journey of the soul. However, Kafka’s representation of transmigration can also be understood in light of theories about post-death experiences and doctrines of reincarnation associated with certain esoteric traditions which were revived during the modern Spiritual Revival.

Pulling the narrative strands together, this chapter describes first the Eliots' evolving perceptions of life after death, from a literal heaven of family reunions to an ongoing mystical life of spirits who visit and counsel the living, to memories and good works that live on through subsequent generations, to the natural process of human atoms being returned to the universe to recombine in new forms and to take on new missions. More central, the chapter looks at the ways the Eliots manage the distance between the living and dead by preserving mementoes, creating memorials, writing their loved one's biographies, recording their histories on tape, and embracing the pain and struggle of separation.

One of the standard categories used by historians of religion to evaluate religions is “this-worldly” versus “other-worldly.” This-worldly religion emphasizes life in the here and now, relationships between people, and the alleviation of suffering in this world during this lifetime. Other-worldly religion focuses attention on life after death, future redemption, and mystical truth. Although no religion is totally this-worldly or totally other-worldly, many scholars find that this terminology is useful in showing us where particular religions invest the most energy, thought, and time. Other-worldly religions may be less ritually rich, or may direct their rituals toward self-perfection and future salvation. Women's religions, attentive to alleviating suffering in the here and now, are characterized by a this-worldly orientation. It is of interest to compare Buddhism to the women's religions that are situated in Buddhist societies. Women's religions in Buddhist societies challenge the other-worldly inclination of Buddhism.

A final goal that a good God would have in creating would be to create creatures who could know, interact with, and worship their holy creator. He will thus sometimes answer their petitionary prayers, and give them the opportunity to discover and love him or to fail to do so, before giving to those who take that opportunity to enjoy the Beatific Vision of himself in life after death.

This chapter discusses the words hover, torment, and waste that resurface in a series of late Henry James’ writings—his introduction to Rupert Brooke’s Letters from America; A Small Boy and Others; Is There a Life after Death?, a letter to Robert S. Rantoul for the 1904 Hawthorne centennial; and his preface to The Tempest. Hover, torment, and waste present different modes of self-subtraction through which author and reader meet. The chapter examines James’s description of Brooke’s early death in the context of the relationship between art and life, and text and world.

This article examines the connection between self-sacrifice and human selfhood. It sets out with the observation that while certain manifestations of self-sacrifice must rightly be condemned as destructive of the self, self-sacrifice cannot be rejected as a whole. Doing so, it is argued, only engenders new risks and compromises our understanding of what it means to be a relational human being in the face of finitude and sin. Against this background, and with particular recourse to the thought of Gabriel Marcel, the main argument of the article is developed. This consists in the development of a criteriology for when and why self-sacrifice does in fact have the potential to build up and fulfil, rather than undermine, the self. The proposed founding criteria for self-sacrifice include an intersubjective anthropology, the dependency of self-sacrifice on love and desire, and an affirmation of life after death.

Belief in the supernatural remained strong, especially among women, albeit a hybrid of orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and folklore, individually or communally customized in a ‘pick-and-mix’ of convictions and habits, often only loosely connected with institutional religion. Sample surveys shed some light on this world. Belief in God exceeded three-quarters, but support for a personal God diminished. Likewise, belief in Jesus Christ was steady at four-fifths, but His divinity was increasingly doubted. Belief in an afterlife was less pervasive, held by about one-half, with hell dropping out of, and reincarnation coming into, fashion. Some paranormal beliefs appealed to one in two people, others to only one-tenth, although more paid lip-service than believed, especially when it came to practising superstitions or reading horoscopes. Alternative beliefs notably attracted the young. A minority of the population claimed to have had a ‘religious’ experience, usually just once or twice, and often not obviously religious.

This introductory chapter seeks to identify the timeless cult (with all its religious overtones) appeal of the Frankenstein story, particularly for children, as it is captured in cinema via the 1931 film of the same name. At the elemental level, Frankenstein is a story of birth—and of “giving birth”, even as it addresses the realisation of death, and the possibility of life after death—both of which would doubtless appeal to and appease childhood anxieties. Additionally, belief systems generally invent an afterlife, or reincarnation, and so does Frankenstein's Monster, as it keeps returning, even after his many deaths, to go about his usual business. The cinema itself is a defiance of death, a graveyard where viewers can re-live past experiences, hear the voices of the dead, and see people long gone. The Frankenstein Monster is the perfect leading man for this ritual.

Seeking to make sense of what is going on in the world without taking account of religion results in understanding that is seriously deficient. Few questions about humanity are more contentious than to ask ‘What is the contribution of religion to human flourishing?’ For many religious believers, their faith is core to their being—a key component of how they understand themselves and the world as a whole. For some atheists, religion is an evil that does great harm and holds humanity back from fulfilling its potential. Despite the trope that we are living in an age of increasing secularization, the percentage of the world’s population who are religious is predicted to increase slightly over the next forty years. In this chapter we explore whether religion makes the world a better place and ask ‘is it true?’ We also ask what happens to us once we die.

Here the focus is on non-dissociation arguments against animalism. A number of such arguments drawn from the writings of Lynne Rudder Baker are considered and rejected. Eric Olson’s argument, based on the fact that it seems that brains and heads can be counted as thinking, is also considered and rejected. Although there is no proof that there are no good non-dissociation arguments it is concluded that the known ones are not cogent. The question then is what implications animalism has. It is argued that it is a metaphysical thesis which is of intrinsic interest to us, and so its relevance does not depend on external implications. It is argued though that if true it does not imply anything like the correctness of vegetarianism, nor that the notion of humanity is a basic notion in moral thinking. It creates problems for the idea of life after death. However, there is some chance that it will illuminate our thinking about what is good in human life, when we recognize our fundamental animal nature.

This chapter presents new findings about Maria von Herbert’s life. Building on this, an interpretation is offered of what she means when she calls upon Kant ‘for solace … or for counsel to prepare [her] for death’. It is then argued that Kant’s reply is more satisfactory than is commonly appreciated, as he explicitly defines the roles which he is prepared to adopt—that of a ‘moral physician’ and of a ‘mediator’—and thus the standards by which to judge his reply. Having said that, his letter does not address what has been viewed as a challenge to Kantian ethics. It is a matter of dispute what exactly this challenge consists in. This chapter identifies the challenge and the terms in which it is most productively stated. Finally, it provides sufficient reasons to establish that a portrait that resurfaced in November 2016 does indeed depict Maria von Herbert.

This chapter reviews the book Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe: An Intellectual Biography (2004), by Bart Schultz. If social good for all or most people is to be achieved, it will be because somehow or other the selfish decisions of many people combine to produce it. Such Utilitarian ideas, however, are but an amputated limb of the radical philosophy that once went by that name. For the three great British Utilitarians—Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick—the proper social goal was the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Sidgwick domesticated Utilitarianism and made it both academically and socially respectable, in the process smoothing its rough edges. Unlike Bentham and Mill, Sidgwick wanted badly to believe in conventional religion. He tried to prove the existence of a life after death scientifically, co-founding the Society for Psychical Research and devoting a great part of his later life to experiments that tested the claims of mediums, clairvoyants, and hypnotists. Sidgwick was also profoundly unconventional in matters of gender and sexuality.