How Life Should End

It was not hard for Sightings to spot a topic of importance this week. “How life ends: Death is inevitable. A bad death is not” was on the cover of The Economist (April 29th). Inside were stories with headlines like “How to have a better death” and “Mending mortality.” And there was a story about Brazil, “Death wishes.” The task for this columnist is to spot references to religion(s), something one would think would be natural, since the “Abrahamic faiths” have so much to say about death, dying, and what might follow. Yet we did not find anything about religion or the religions or religious hopes in The Economist's main story.