Category: Death
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Introduction to Tradition Magazine, Issue Two: Death
Here we are again slipping into winter, and for most of the natural world, winter is a time of dying. Many animals will not survive the winter: the ones who are too old, the ones who are too young, the foolish, the unlucky, the squirrel who has forgotten where he hid the nuts. It’s no…
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Athenagoras on the details of the Resurrection
About the Author: Christianity teaches that the dead will rise again in a physical resurrection. This is a comforting doctrine, but right from the start Christians realized that it raises philosophical questions as well. How does a resurrection work? If we get back the same bodies that we had, how can we account for the…
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Sonnet 13
About the Author: William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) was active in the years after Catholicism became illegal in England. Part of the case that he was a secret Catholic ties Shakespeare to Saint Thomas More. In Shakespeare’s official plays, More is almost written out, but Shakespeare and other authors collaborated on a play about Saint…
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How Death came into the World
About the Story: In the first pages of Genesis (3:1-19) we encounter the story of original sin, precipitated by Eve’s encounter with the strange figure of the serpent in the garden. This can be no ordinary serpent. Snakes don’t talk, and they also don’t tempt people, and we are not original in viewing the serpent as a…
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Saint Gregory the Great
About the Author: In his Dialogues, Saint Gregory in conversation is challenged on the immortality of the soul. He tells stories to make the case. Saint Gregory makes the point that saints offer a specifically Catholic case for the immortality of the soul: “For sick persons come unto their dead bodies, and be cured: perjured persons…
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Caring For Nothing
About the Author: Graeme Hunter is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa, and a Research Professor at the Dominican University College in Ottawa. His recent books include Pascal the Philosopher: An Introduction (2014) and What Came to Mind: Essays against Fear (Justin Press, 2023). His philosophical interests are wide and range over Early modern Philosophy, Ancient…
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Saint Theresa of Avila
About the Author: Saint Theresa of Avila (1515 – 1582) is remembered as an ascetic, an author, a founder of convents, a reformer, a poet, and a mystic. Here she considers death in her 1583 book, The Way of Perfection. Wherever this love is, then, you will not fail to recognize it; I do not know…
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Walther von der Vogelweide grows old
About the Author: Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 1170 – c. 1230 AD) was the greatest of the Minnesänger, the wandering poets of the Middle Ages who sang of love and duty at the courts of the nobles of the Holy Roman Empire. It is unclear whether Walther began life as a noble knight, though…
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An Instruction Unto Them That Shall Die
About the work: The Ars Moriendi, or “Art of Dying” was a genre of Christian spirituality that rose to prominence after the disaster of the Bubonic Plague wiped out up to fifty percent of Europe’s population. The present work was written in the mid-fifteenth century, probably by a Dominican friar, and reminds you, the reader, that…
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The Last Will and Testament of Thomas Martyn, Farmer
About the Author: In 1473 a farmer named Thomas Martyn had his will recorded in Kent, and by an accident of history it was preserved. It is almost entirely from this document that we know anything about Thomas Martyn. We can guess that he was a farmer because so many of his bequests were of…