Religion in political campaigns, church-state controversies, clerical abuse scandals, and abortion arguments, received due (and over-due?) attention in the media for another week. Having sighted more than enough items in those now-familiar fields, we looked for attention to and coverage of religion as it is experienced regularly by most people. One event that reaches not only “most,” but “all,” people is death. The obituaries are full of religious references, quite naturally, but there are also many philosophical treatments of this universal experience.
This week’s “for example” is Daniel Akst’s “Facing Up to Death,” a review of Katie Roiphe’s The Violet Hour. Among those in Roiphe’s book (Wall Street Journal, Mar. 4) are several recent “facing-up-to” writers including Susan Sontag, John Updike, James Salter and Maurice Sendak.
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