Chapter 8 explores Homeric religion as lived practice rather than abstract theology. It examines fate and choice, divine agents and human responsibility, and the rituals that connected communities to the sacred. The chapter discusses sacred places, prayer and sacrifice, and the afterlife, showing how epic memory uses the gods to think through uncertainty, mortality, and the limits of control.

This chapter considers how self-harm, suicide, and views of the afterlife reveal the radical shift between Greco-Roman tradition and Christianity with regard to the self. Classical Greek language uses the same auto- compound words to indicate self-willed action, suicide and kin-murder. From Homer through to Roman ideals of masculinity, significant action is generally understood with regard to the possibility of lasting fame, not with regard to a punishment or reward in an afterlife. In contrast to this picture, Christianity insists that each action is evaluated after death and contributes either to punishment or reward in an afterlife: life is a preparation for the afterlife. In particular, and in contrast to the earlier tradition, suicide becomes now a morally reprehensible act. For the faithful, however, martyrs become a model of willing death, which must be kept separate from suicide in evaluation. Ascetics enact a bodily self-harm to perfect their own holiness: physical self-harm becomes a positive gesture of self-fulfilment, dependent on the promise of a life after death. The Western model of the self is deeply influenced by this Christian modelling – and yet neither self-harm nor death play any role in Charles Taylor’s discussions of the history of the self

Explores various Jewish conceptions of an afterlife: immortality of the soul; resurrection; reincarnation; and the legacy concept—that immortality consists in one’s impact on the future. Working through a wide range of reasons for and against each position, the chapter notes the variety that exists in the kinds of reasons advanced. It then discusses whether an afterlife has value and why there is death.

This chapter discusses how individuals approach the end of life within their particular social worlds. Focusing on the subjective processes of traversing transitions between life, death, and an afterlife, psychological anthropology analyzes how such transitions are simultaneously singular and shared, embodied and historical. The chapter highlights five themes. It shows how the end of life is a period in which personhood may be particularly unstable, giving rise to ethical demand to make, remake or unmake personhood. The chapter shows how narrative approaches shed light on the temporalization of living in the face of finitude. The chapter discusses how person-centered approaches reveal that the singularity of loss often exceeds moral and social attempts to contain grief. It discusses political subjectivity in psychological anthropology that highlights how historical inequality and violence settle in embodied disorders, hauntings, and abandonment. Discussing questions of empathy and emotion, the chapter concludes by drawing attention to the potential of ethnographic studies of dying and afterlives to theorize the limits and possibilities of understanding others.

Raymond Moody’s book Life after Life (1975, latest version 2015) introduced the term “near-death experience.” into modern and widely circulated English-language literature.Right from the beginning, the term NDE was closely linked to the belief in an afterlife. The academic career of Moody and the perception of Moody’s book in the USA show that reported near-death experiences may have expressed personal truth, but without persuasive attempts to explain NDEs scientifically.

Chapter 7 examines representations of the afterlife: the heavens and purgatory. Venetian artists created some of the most spectacular visions of paradise of the century, works that pulse with vibrancy and life, deploying a series of artistic devices to insist on the veracity of the supernatural. Venice was also home to one of the earliest and most comprehensive purgatorial cycles in Italy, a theme that became an ever more popular one as the seventeenth century progressed.

This chapter begins by exploring the dramatic elements of the dialogue’s brief but rich opening scene, which introduces the bully Polemarchus and sets up the dialogue’s alliances: Glaucon–Socrates and Polemarchus–Adeimantus. It then examines Cephalus’ turn to justice in the nick of time – as death approaches – and his surprising belief that without wealth a man has no alternative but to be unjust. It analyzes the objections Socrates raises to Cephalus’ conception of justice as payment of debts to men and gods, and suggests that the examples Socrates uses in his challenge to Cephalus are not simple exceptions to the rule but rather shift the conception of justice away from mechanical rule-following to the responsibility one incurs – when circumstances place one in a position of responsibility – to protect others from harm. The relationship between Cephalus and Polemarchus, father and son, is described and assessed, as is the relationship between their distinct views of justice.

Chapter 7 examines changes in religious ideas about the soul and the afterlife among the aristocracy, elites, and non-elites. By reintegrating craft goods back into their tomb context, this chapter evaluates how, on the one hand, properly mourning the dead came to define a new moral vanguard, and on the other, also led to the creative manipulation of class boundaries through individual conspicuous displays of mourning.

Like religious leaders in any period, the prophets functioned within a religious world that was broader and more diverse than a surface reading might suggest. In “The Book of Isaiah in the History of Israelite Religion,” Christopher B. Hays analyzes various religiohistorical aspects of the book, such as the role of writing and symbolic action; the supernatural images of the divine throne room; the book’s role in developing ideas about death and afterlife; its central role in the formulation of biblical monotheism, including its polemics against idols; and its relationship to the Jerusalem Temple and its priests.

In the course of the 1960s, mathematical modeling gradually stabilized as the primary mode of academic economic research. The Epilogue sketches the fate of “the Solow model” as it consolidated as an epistemic standard for an intellectual practice that focused on refining mathematical artifacts and using them to estimate model-relationships in any given data sets. Building on the idea that it already developed a life of its own at Solow’s desk, the Epilogue inquires into the movements and transformations of the multifarious artifact. It was adapted, extended, and reduced in relation to specific local, institutional, and strategic arrangements in planning offices, universities, and research institutions. Sketching some of its trajectories in the field of growth accounting and macroeconomic management, I wonder how the model sedimented into knowledge infrastructures and how the model’s knowledge, as precarious as it might have been, was equipped with computability, prognostic potential, and policy effectiveness.

As prophetic texts were charged with new meanings by readers of the Bible in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, exegetes, philosophers, artists, and poets tried to define what made a prophet strong and successful, hoping to find new models for artistic inspiration and political and national leadership, as well as integrity, courage, and authenticity. Yet even as prophetic figures were idealized as powerful men who could stride with towering authority and speak with majestic resonance, they also served as emblems of exile, failure, and alienation. Modern representations of prophecy vacillate between emptiness and fullness, strength and weakness. This instability in the representation of prophets and prophecy originates in the biblical text itself. We can trace a countertradition of poets, who, rather than trying to find heroes, create hierarchies, and systematize the biblical text, using prophecy’s instability to enliven and enrich their own texts. They actively exploit the fissures of both ancient and modern prophecy to create stirring, innovative, and often radical literary works from prophetic weakness itself.