Mortality: The Measure of Our Days
In this Audio Reprint, ethicist Gilbert Meilaender considers the different ways in which we can think about our death, particularly from the paradoxical “simultaneities” of our finite nature and our transcendent desires. We are dual creatures, writes Meilaender, simultaneously bound by nature’s cycles and yet freed from mere finitude by our God-directed ends. To view death solely from one or the other of these realities is to trivialize either our spiritual longings or our historical and physical experiences. Taking his cues from Charlotte’s Web, Bambi, and The Last Battle, Meilaender confronts contemporary inclinations to deny death by placing both death and life within a spiritual framework that enables us to “measure our days.”
This article was originally published in First Things, February 1991. Read by Ken Myers. 51 minutes.
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