ABSTRACT
It is to this inchoate field of scientific study that Tomer, Eliason and Wong make a welcome contribution in their editorship of this volume. Capitalizing on the current Zeitgeist and its growing acknowledgment of the role of meaning and spirituality in coping with adverse life events, the editors build a solid foundation for future work by anchoring it in a tradition of existential philosophy dating at least as far back as Pascal and Kierkegaard, and their struggle to find a solution to the dread of death in the cultivation of faith. By offering a thought-provoking summary of the twentieth-century existentialism of Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, the opening chapter challenges the reader to engage the problem of angst in the face of non-being, and to grapple with its prospects for
undermining life’s meaning, or alternatively, offering the very grounds for living authentically. Further layers of this tradition offer elaborations and counterpoints to these largely individualistic, and often explicitly atheistic or agnostic formulations by emphasizing the prospects for transcendence of existential isolation in the face of death through cultivation of relatedness to others (as in the work of Buber or Levinas) or to a sense of oneness with the natural world (as in the work of Brown or Wilber). Finally, admittedly optimistic voices are added to the discourse through an evocation of the work of Tillich, Frankel and Yalom, each of whom finds grounds for hope even in the face of human contingency in the experience of faith, purpose, and committed action, respectively. Thus, from the very outset, the reader is invited into a deep-going dialogue about the place of death in human life, and its relation to matters of ultimate concern. With this as a background, he or she is then well-positioned to follow the conceptual, empirical and clinical extensions of these theories into a variety of research and practice contexts in subsequent chapters.
