MachineMachine /stream

Will my enduring ghost be a mute witness to the goings-on down here, waving its vapory arms frantically at the undead? Or will it be an agent, endowed with the capacity to act? Put differently, if someone chooses to immortalize me in lyric, will I get to sing along?

Extremely odd queries of this sort kept leaping to mind as I perused four recently released books about the afterlife. Two examine what science has to say about the possibility that we persevere even after our bodies have ceased to function. One amasses perceptions of heaven and hell across cultural time and space. The other makes the philosophical case that "a good person quite literally survives death."

This is not a topic that is easy to discuss. As Dinesh D'Souza points out in Life After Death: The Evidence, the afterlife is something not to be addressed, a "big taboo." Fred Frohock, of the University of Miami, remarks that the issue is usually avoided on secular campuses. Princeton's Mark Johnston, author of Survivin