ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the concepts of hope and eschatology related to questions of euthanasia. The author emphasises the rapid change of attitudes in the current Nordic societies with regard to both suicide and euthanasia. He takes his point of departure in the novel “Grace” by Linn Ullman. This story is connected with the Nordic cultural context, where secular modernity meets a late modern, post-secular mentality. Furthermore he asks in what way these different cultural frameworks influence our possibility to deal with questions of life and death, and how eschatology will find different expressions within those different cultural frames.
In a multicultural situation the question of euthanasia must remain quite open, according to the author. There are no once and for all given answers to these kinds of questions. Pointing to our ambivalent cultural situation with two different frames shaping people’s worldviews the chapter shows that eschatology matters – and why. It matters within both frames. However, the author urges that eschatology comes closer to concrete human life when understood within a late modern setting.
