The Root of Immortality

Death in the Context of Jewish Wisdom

Bibliographic Data

ID20291620
AuthorsJohn J Collins (0000-0001-5072-972X, DePaul University, corresponding author)
Year1978
Volume71
Issue3-4
Pages177-192
Publication date1978-10-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHarvard Theological Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0017-8160 • E-ISSN: 1475-4517
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0017816000026079
OpenAlexW2262924561
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited11

In his influential study The Sacred Canopy , Peter Berger asserted that “the power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death or, more accurately, as they walk, inevitably, toward it.” Berger was not suggesting that religion is primarily a private obsession of the individual with death. Rather his thesis is that religion is a social phenomenon, part of the human enterprise of “world-building” by which we attempt “to impose a meaningful order upon reality.” The significance of death is not an individual matter because “death radically challenges all socially objectivated definitions of reality—of the world, of others, and of the self. Death radically puts in question the taken-for-granted, ‘business-as-usual’ attitude in which one exists in everyday life. Here everything in the daytime world of existence in society is massively threatened with ‘irreality’—that is, everything in that world becomes dubious, eventually unreal, other than what one used to think.” In short, death is a threat to the meaningfulness not only of the individual life, but of the common enterprise of society and, indeed, of any attempt, social, religious or philosophical, to perceive reality as a coherent and purposeful order

Aesthetics · Afterlife · Context (archaeology) · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Everyday life · Immortality · Judaism · Order (exchange) · Power (physics) · Root (linguistics) · Social reality · Social science · Sociology · Theology · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Philosophy

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