One of the most profound, deeply affecting questions we face as human beings is the matter of our mortality--and its connection to immortality. Ancient animist ghost cultures, Egyptian mummification, late Jewish hopes of resurrection, Christian eternal salvation, Muslim belief in hell and paradise all spring from a remarkably consistent impulse to tether a triumph over death to our conduct in life. In After Lives, British scholar John Casey provides a rich historical and philosophical exploration of the world beyond, from the ancient Egyptians to St. Thomas Aquinas, from Martin Luther to modern Mormons. In a lively, wide-ranging discussion, he examines such topics as predestination, purgatory, Spiritualism, the Rapture, Armageddon and current Muslim apocalyptics, as well as the impact of such influences as the New Testament, St. Augustine, Dante, and the Second Vatican Council. Ideas of heaven and hell, Casey argues, illuminate how we understand the ultimate nature of sin, justice, punishment, and our moral sense itself. The concepts of eternal bliss and eternal punishment express--and test--our ideas of good and evil. For example, the ancient Egyptians saw the afterlife as flowing from ma'at, a sense of being in harmony with life, a concept that includes truth, order, justice, and the fundamental law of the universe. "It is an optimistic view of life," he writes. "It is an ethic that connects wisdom with moral goodness." Perhaps just as revealing, Casey finds, are modern secular interpretations of heaven and hell, as he probes the place of goodness, virtue, and happiness in the age of psychology and scientific investigation. With elegant prose, a magisterial grasp of a vast literary and religious history, and moments of humor and irony, After Lives sheds new light on the question of life, death, and morality in human culture.

After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory

Religion & Spirituality

Casey, John.

Religious Studies

Oxford University Press

The study of the virtues has largely dropped out of modern philosophy, yet it was the predominant tradition in ethics from the ancient Greeks until Kant. Traditionally the study of the virtues included the study of what constituted a successful and happy life. Drawing on such diverse sources as Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Hume, Jane Austen, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Sartre, Casey here argues that the classical virtues of courage, temperance, practical wisdom, and justice centrally define the good for humans, and that they are insufficiently acknowledged in modern moral philosophy. He suggests that values of success, worldliness, and pride are active parts of our moral thinking, and that the conflict between these and our equally important Christian inheritance leads to tensions and contradictions in our understanding of the moral life.

Pagan Virtue: An Essay in Ethics (Clarendon Paperbacks)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Clarendon Press

The study of the virtues has largely dropped out of modern philosophy, yet it was the predominant tradition in ethics fom the ancient Greeks until Kant. Traditionally the study of the virtues was also the study of what constituted a successful and happy life. Drawing on such diverse sources as Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Hume, Jane Austen, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Sartre, Casey here argues that the classical virtues of courage, temperance, practical wisdom, and justice centrally define the good for humans, and that they are insufficiently acknowledged in modern moral philosophy. He suggests that values of success, worldliness, and pride are active parts of our moral thinking, and that the conflict between these and our equally important Christian inheritance leads to tensions and contradictions in our understanding of the moral life.

Pagan Virtue: An Essay in Ethics

New Age & Spirituality

One of the most profound, deeply affecting questions we face as human beings is the matter of our mortality--and its connection to immortality. Ancient animist ghost cultures, Egyptian mummification, late Jewish hopes of resurrection, Christian eternal salvation, Muslim belief in hell and paradise all spring from a remarkably consistent impulse to tether a triumph over death to our conduct in life. In After Lives, British scholar John Casey provides a rich historical and philosophical exploration of the world beyond, from the ancient Egyptians to St. Thomas Aquinas, from Martin Luther to modern Mormons. In a lively, wide-ranging discussion, he examines such topics as predestination, purgatory, Spiritualism, the Rapture, Armageddon and current Muslim apocalyptics, as well as the impact of such influences as the New Testament, St. Augustine, Dante, and the Second Vatican Council. Ideas of heaven and hell, Casey argues, illuminate how we understand the ultimate nature of sin, justice, punishment, and our moral sense itself. The concepts of eternal bliss and eternal punishment express--and test--our ideas of good and evil. For example, the ancient Egyptians saw the afterlife as flowing from ma'at, a sense of being in harmony with life, a concept that includes truth, order, justice, and the fundamental law of the universe. "It is an optimistic view of life," he writes. "It is an ethic that connects wisdom with moral goodness." Perhaps just as revealing, Casey finds, are modern secular interpretations of heaven and hell, as he probes the place of goodness, virtue, and happiness in the age of psychology and scientific investigation. With elegant prose, a magisterial grasp of a vast literary and religious history, and moments of humor and irony, After Lives sheds new light on the question of life, death, and morality in human culture.

The overriding challenge for our species during the 21st century, many believe, will be that of evolving…or becoming extinct. Can the theory of evolution be expanded into a source of guidance that could help our species save itself? This collection brings together the thinking of scholars in a wide range of fields in social as well as natural science directed to this end.
Moving beyond a critique of neo-Darwinism and sociobiology to explore the action implications of new theory―including Loye's reconstruction of the long ignored full vision of Charles Darwin and Laszlo's new QVI fifth field theory―essays explore the potential for the impact of self-organizing and self-regulating organism, of the biology of love, and the moral directional thrust of the human, as revealed in new discoveries in the fields of biology, psychology, brain research, sociology, economics, history, cultural evolution, and Darwinian re-evaluation. As such, the collection will be of interest to the educational community, the futurist community, and the more general global foresight community of concerned people.

The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

Literature & Fiction

Dubus III, Andre

McPherson, James Alan

Pancake, Breece D'J

United States

Back Bay Books

From the author of the novel Spartina, which won the National Book Award and has established itself as a modern classic, comes a collection of essays that describe with tenderhearted candor and humor a lifetime’s worth of addiction. No, not an addiction to booze or drugs, but an addiction to a more natural gratification: the joy of sport, exercise, and the sheer elation of being ready and willing to say yes to a challenge. Want to run a marathon? OK. Climb Mount Katahdin? Sure! How about canoeing the entire length of the Delaware River? Why not? Spanning more than fifty years of ambitious and sometimes peculiar endeavors, these essays take us along on some of Casey’s greatest adventures: a twenty-six-day Outward Bound course in Maine during the dead of winter; being pinned by a two-hundred-pound judo instructor whose words, “Come on, white boy. Don’t give up,” encourage at least one more attempt at escape; leading a lost couple on a yacht through the rocky waterways of Narragansett Bay by a simple rowboat; and completing—on his seventieth birthday—a 70K marathon of his own devising that included rowing, bicycling, skating, Rollerblading, and finally, trotting the dog out for a mile. Be it a preoccupation with health, vanity, or just an indomitably playful sense of adventure, John Casey’s Room for Improvement is a joyful self-portrait of a writer who loves going to extremes, just to find out what it’s like once he gets there.

Room for Improvement: Notes on a Dozen Lifelong Sports

Health, Fitness & Dieting

KNOPF

PEN/ESPN Award Finalist Spanning more than fifty years of ambitious and wild endeavors, Room for Improvement chronicles John Casey's most peculiar addiction, that of an adrenaline junky. Here we see Casey taking part in an Outward Bound course in Maine during the dead of winter; being pinned by a two-hundred-pound judo instructor; leading a lost couple on a yacht through the rocky waterways of Narragansett Bay by a simple rowboat; and completing--on his seventieth birthday--a 70K marathon of his own devising that included rowing, bicycling, skating, dog walking, and rollerblading. Be it a preoccupation with health or just an indomitably playful sense of adventure, John Casey's insatiable drive is an inspiration to us all

Room for Improvement: A Life in Sport

Sports & Outdoors

Biographies

Vintage

Breece D'J Pancake cut short a promising career when he took his own life at the age twenty-six. Published posthumously, this is a collection of stories that depict the world of Pancake's native rural West Virginia.

Spartina

Contemporary

The Bodley Head, Ltd.

It’s been more than two decades since Spartina won the National Book Award and was acclaimed by critics as being “possibly the best American novel . . . since The Old Man and the Sea” (The New York Times Book Review), but in this extraordinary follow-up novel barely any time has passed in the magical landscape of salt ponds and marshes in John Casey’s fictional Rhode Island estuary. Elsie Buttrick, prodigal daughter of the smart set who are gradually taking over the coastline of Sawtooth Point, has just given birth to Rose, a child conceived during a passionate affair with Dick Pierce—a fisherman and the love of Elsie’s life, who also happens to live practically next door with his wife, May, and their children. A beautiful but guarded woman who feels more at ease wading through the marshes than lounging on the porches of the fashionable resort her sister and brother-in-law own, Elsie was never one to do as she was told. She is wary of the discomfort her presence poses among some members of her gossipy, insular community, yet it is Rose, the unofficially adopted daughter and little sister of half the town, who magnetically steers everyone in her orbit toward unexpected—and unbreakable—relationships. As we see Rose grow from a child to a plucky adolescent with a flair for theatrics both onstage and at home during verbal boxing matches with her mother, to a poised and prepossessing teenager, she becomes the unwitting emotional tether between Elsie and everyone else. “Face it, Mom,” Rose says, “we live in a tiny ecosystem.” And indeed, like the rugged, untouched marshes that surround these characters, theirs is an ecosystem that has come by its beauty honestly, through rhythms and moods that have shaped and reshaped their lives. With an uncanny ability to plunge confidently and unwaveringly into the thoughts and desires of women—mothers, daughters, wives, lovers—John Casey astonishes us again with the power of a family saga.

Compass Rose

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Casey, John.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Casey, John.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Casey, John.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory

Pagan Virtue: An Essay in Ethics (Clarendon Paperbacks)

Pagan Virtue: An Essay in Ethics

After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory

The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

Room for Improvement: Notes on a Dozen Lifelong Sports

Room for Improvement: A Life in Sport

The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

Spartina

Compass Rose