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A new reconstruction of cultic practices surrounding death in ancient Israel

In Caring for the Dead in Ancient Israel, Kerry M. Sonia examines the commemoration and care for the dead in ancient Israel against the broader cultural backdrop of West Asia. This cult of dead kin, often referred to as ancestor cult, comprised a range of ritual practices in which the living provided food and drink offerings, constructed commemorative monuments, invoked the names of the dead, and protected their remains. This ritual care negotiated the ongoing relationships between the living and the dead and, in so doing, helped construct social, political, and religious landscapes in relationship to the past. Sonia explores the nature of this cult of dead kin in ancient Israel, focusing on its role within the family and household as well as its relationship to Israel’s national deity and the Jerusalem temple.

Features:

• A reevaluation of whether burial and necromantic rituals were part of the cult of dead kin
• A portrait of the various roles Israelite women played in the cult of dead kin
• A reassessment of biblical writers’ attitudes toward the cult of dead kin

By the age of eight, Charlotte Brontë had lost first her mother and then her two older sisters. Later, in a second wave of deaths, her brother and two younger sisters died, leaving her a sole survivor.

With subtlety and imagination, Robert Keefe examines Brontë’s works as the creative response to these losses, particularly the loss of her mother. Terrified and yet fascinated by death, struggling with guilt, remorse, and a deep sense of rejection, Charlotte Brontë found in art a way to come to terms with death through its symbolic reenactment. In her earlier writings she created a fictional world marked by devices that allow her to control or deny death. In her later works these mechanisms evolved into mature expressions of a profound psychological reality.

Brontë’s preoccupation with death is seen in her fiction in the recurring patterns of separation and exile. Keefe traces the development of these motifs in the juvenilia and the four novels: The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette.

Unique in its emphasis on the maternal relationships in Brontë’s life and art, this study also explores certain aspects of her life that have often puzzled biographers.

Grief transformed into legacy—how loss shaped the soul of American literature.

Harold K. Bush's Continuing Bonds with the Dead examines the profound transfiguration that the death of a child wrought on the literary work of nineteenth-century American writers. Taking as his subjects Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Bush demonstrates how the death of a child became the defining "before-and-after moment" in their lives as adults and as artists. In narrating their struggles, Bush maps the intense field of creative energy induced by reverberating waves of parental grief and the larger nineteenth-century culture of mortality and grieving.

Bush explores in detail how each of these five writers grappled with and were altered by the loss of a child. He writes, for example, with moving insights about how the famed author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn found himself adrift on a river of grief when meningitis struck down his daughter, Susy. In his deeply learned exploration of Twain's subsequent work, Bush illuminates how Twain wrote to cope with Susy's death, to make sense of her persistent presence in his life, and possibly to redeem her loss. Passionate and personal, Bush's insightful prose traces the paths of personal transformation each of these emblematic American writers took in order to survive the spiritual trauma of loss.

The savage Civil War was America's shared "before and after moment," the pivot upon which the nation's future swung. Bush's account of these five writers' grief amplifies our understanding of America's evolving, national relationship to mourning from then to the present.

In a cure-focused profession, the death of a patient can often feel like a failure. Yet, every patient will inevitably transition from health to illness, independence to dependence, and life to death. These transitions often mark some of the most meaningful interactions between patients and care providers. Coping with Loss is a self-directed workbook that provides addresses common questions, concerns, and emotional responses to these interactions with dying patients. Each lesson opens with real stories of professional grief that will resonate with healthcare professionals at multiple stages of their careers. Critical topics covered include recognizing the diverse presentations of grief, identifying dying patients, decompressing individually, and debriefing as a team. Significant portions of the text discuss how challenging patient cases impact the formation of professional identity.  Ultimately, this workbook provides a place for healthcare providers to reflect on their patient interactions and learn how to support themselves and their healthcare teams through grief.