Usefulness of a Health Education and Promotion Book Club to Teach About Race and Social Justice

Emphasizing the value of utilizing both facts and stories to teach and learn about health, race, and social justice, this reflection makes a case for using The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Well: What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health to create a dialogue with undergraduate health education students. The unique combination of facts and stories that the two books provide sparked conversations from which both my students and I were grateful to learn.

Desirability without Desire: Life Extension, Boredom and Spiritual Experience

In response to Bernard Williams’ suspicion that we would inevitably become bored with immortal life, John Martin Fischer has argued that we could continue to enjoy repeatable pleasures such as fine wine, beautiful music, and spiritual experiences. In more recent work on near-death experiences, Fischer has also explored the non-religious meaning of spiritual experiences in more depth. I join this deeper exploration of spiritual experience, and I also join Williams’ critics who question his view that character and desire are needed to explain the desirability of life, while providing additional reason for concern that Williams’ way of valuing life may itself actually be a cause of boredom with life. With an eye to spiritual experience, I indicate how we can distance ourselves even further from Williams’ view, and I suggest how the attitude that life is good but death is not bad emerges from spiritual experience, as expressed in numerous religious and secular spiritual traditions. This lends support to the conclusion that radically extended life is desirable even if not actively desired.

The Wisdom of Solomon

The Wisdom of Solomon is a rhetorically sophisticated composition written near the turn of the era in Alexandria, Egypt. While early scholars saw the text as a product of several authors from different times and places, more recent studies have gone a long way in demonstrating the unity of the text. The unique confluence of diverse elements, whether apocalyptic and sapiential themes, Stoic and Platonic philosophy, or multiple literary forms, has provided scholars ample opportunity to debate the main arguments and purpose of the text, the audience at which it was aimed, and the position of the text with respect to wider Hellenistic culture. One of the more unique features of Wisdom is the uncertainty surrounding many of its core concepts and figures. This crafted ambiguity offers a multiplicity of meaning that draws the reader in to engage more closely with the central lessons of the text on how to be a righteous person and secure the future immortal life of the soul.

The Impossible Thing

Would an immortal life become so boring that it would eventually result in a debilitating boredom? This chapter examines that question. Others have pointed out that if repeatable activities are pursued, then that should allow us to stay engaged. And if memory and anticipation are limited so that we cannot remember everything, we will not be bored. A separate question is whether we might lose our human priorities if we were immortal. It is argued here that other limits besides death will preserve some structure in human choice.

What Is It Like To Be Immortal?

The idea of an eternal and immortal life like the one we lead now seems quite appealing because (i) it will be sufficiently like our own earth-bound life and (ii) we will have the same kinds of desires we have now to want to live an eternal life. This paper will challenge the view that we have a conception of what the conscious experience of an immortal is like, regardless of whether we might want to live it. Given that for us to conceive of an immortal life we must project onto it our own view of what it is like to live our own life and given that an immortal life may not be anything like the life we live, we cannot conceive of what it is like to be immortal.