The Sting of Death

Abstract

“Although we no longer live in a world constructed around imagery of heaven, purgatory, and hell, a look at past attempts to comprehend the ‘great riddle’ of death, as Augustine remarked, might help us. Listening first-hand to the words of Augustine, Calvin, or Kierkegaard vividly illustrates the tenor of the changes that have occurred over the sweep of more than nineteen centuries—but also the constancy of human experience beneath the changes. … [T]hey depict a reality we know, and in a way that can help us think about it more clearly.”