Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    What Happens When We Die?
    What Happens When We Die?
    What Happens When We Die?
    Ebook53 pages47 minutes

    What Happens When We Die?

    By Thomas G. Long

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A straightforward treatment of the only existential issue that matters from the Christian perspective.

    In What Happens When We Die? Tom Long provides information about the promises and convictions of the Christian gospel concerning death and life after death. He surveys in simple terms the major themes surrounding death, dying, and hope for an afterlife.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChurch Publishing
    Release dateAug 1, 2017
    ISBN9780898692648
    What Happens When We Die?
    Author

    Thomas G. Long

    Thomas G. Long is Bandy Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Candler School of Theology,  Emory University. He has taught preaching for over forty years, and his introductory textbook, The Witness of Preaching, has been translated into a number of languages and is widely used in theological schools around the world. Long has served as the president of the Academy of Homiletics and as senior homiletics editor of the New Interpreter’s Bible. He has been editor of Theology Today and serves as an editor-at-large at The Christian Century. Long has been honored with the distinction of delivering the Lyman Beecher Lectures in Preaching at Yale Divinity School and was also named by Time magazine as one of the most effective preachers in the English language. A Presbyterian minister, Long has served churches in Georgia and New Jersey.

    Read more from Thomas G. Long

    Related to What Happens When We Die?

    Titles in the series (24)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Christianity For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Caregivers For The Spirit

      Jul 21, 2020

      Caregivers For The Spirit
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Pained Intuition and a Palpable Longing: Katie Ford on Theology, Poetry, and the Unknowable

      Sep 13, 2018

      If You Have to Go, the new collection of poems by Katie Ford, is a book that conjures powers of possession. I feel that way about all of her books: Her poems bring me to a mystical plane somewhere between language and life. I’m left shaken. Her willi

      17 min read

    • Article

      Wrapping Our Prayers Around The Immigration Crisis

      Oct 22, 2019

      Strongly held convictions about immigration crises around the world can polarize and divide people. But prayer that seeks God’s answers brings less stridency and more listening, opens the door to wise and balanced solutions, and lifts thoughts from f

      3 min read

    • Article

      Dealing With Grief Online

      Feb 6, 2021

      IN THE era of social distancing, the inability to gather and mourn the loss of a loved one has seen many South Africans turn to online grief counselling to help them deal with the loss. With a drastic increase in deaths over the last few months due t

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Way Of St Francis

      Aug 14, 2019

      The Way Of St Francis
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Transfiguration

      Nov 26, 2020

      The Transfiguration
      3 min read

    • Article

      Does Anyone Ever Really Feel ‘Grown Up’? I Asked Some Older People To Find Out

      Jun 11, 2022

      For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a grownup. As children, my friends and I would play at being shopkeepers and customers, thrilled to inhabit an adult role. As a teenager, I lived alone abroad. By my 30s I had all the things I thought

      9 min read

    • Article

      Facing the LAST TABOO

      Mar 26, 2020

      Facing the LAST TABOO
      4 min read

    • Article

      Should We Die?

      Feb 18, 2017

      “So, you don’t want to die?” I asked Zoltan Istvan, then the Transhumanist candidate for president, as we sat in the lobby of the University of Baltimore one day last fall. “No,” he said, assuredly. “Never.” Istvan, an atheist who physically resemble

      10 min read

    • Article

      Dying To Know

      Mar 8, 2020

      Dying To Know
      2 min read

    • Article

      Grave Concerns

      Feb 6, 2022

      Grave Concerns
      11 min read

    • Article

      Doing Away With Death

      Jan 29, 2019

      Doing Away With Death
      3 min read

    • Article

      Golden Years

      Jun 17, 2022

      Golden Years
      9 min read

    • Article

      Commentary: Barbara Ehrenreich On The Absurd Contradictions Of Trying To Age 'Successfully'

      Feb 15, 2019

      Barbara Ehrenreich, at 77, is learning to just say no – no to the kind of intensive, intrusive medical tests that may tell her absolutely nothing, no to the books and the nostrums that say that you can live forever or make your body grow younger, not

      8 min read

    • Article

      Approaching Life With Humour

      Nov 7, 2021

      I read Diana Clements’ article (“Age-old stereotypes”, October 30) and sighed an old man’s sigh (I’m 72). It seems the focus on “ageist” language can be challenged on two levels. First, it is an easy target that both ignores and replaces the real iss

      9 min read

    • Article

      Our Library

      Jul 29, 2019

      To my question, “Are undertakers, in their capacity of embalmers, guardians of the public health?”, Dr. Carr’s answer was short and to the point: “They are not guardians of anything except their pocketbooks. Public-health virtues of embalming? You ca

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for What Happens When We Die?

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      What Happens When We Die? - Thomas G. Long

      In the Hour of Our Death

      The Fear of Our Mortality

      A good friend of mine read the New York Times bestselling book Being Mortal ¹ by Atul Gawande, a surgeon and a professor at Harvard Medical School. The book is a very frank physician’s description of what it is like for us, as human beings, to come to the end of life. Dr. Gawande describes what it means to grow old, what it means for our bodies to wear down and to fail, and especially what it means to encounter the inevitable truth that we will all die. When my friend got about halfway through the book, he confessed to me, You know, this book scares the heck out of me!

      I understand. What frightened my friend about this book, and what would frighten most of us, I suppose, is right there in the book’s title: Being Mortal. We are all mortal. We will all die. We know that, of course, but until death actually draws near, we know it only in the abstract. There is an old Jewish saying, Everybody knows they’re going to die, but nobody believes it.

      When he was seventy-one years old, the former U.S. president Thomas Jefferson wrote to another former president, the seventy-eight-year-old John Adams,

      Our machines have been running seventy or eighty years and we must expect . . . here a pivot, there a wheel, now a pinion, next a spring will be giving way. . . . There is a ripeness of time for death . . . when it is reasonable we should drop off and make room for another growth.²

      Notice how Jefferson, while frankly admitting that he and Adams will die, still distances himself from the raw reality of it by speaking of death as reasonable and using metaphors for body parts such as wheels and springs. What can be so frightening about a book like Being Mortal is that the author does not gloss over the biological facts, nor does he disguise the bodily deterioration with metaphors. Our blood vessels narrow and become stiff from calcium buildup, Gawande says, causing the heart to pump harder. By age sixty-five, more than half of us have hypertension. At eighty, we have lost between one-quarter and a half of our muscle weight, and after age eighty-five, 40 percent of us have lost all of our teeth. Gawande goes on:

      Although the processes can be slowed—diet and physical exercise can make a difference—they cannot be stopped. Our functional lung capacity decreases. Our bowels slow down. Our glands stop functioning. Even our brains shrink: at the age of thirty, the brain is a three-pound organ that barely fits inside the skull; by our seventies, gray-matter loss leaves almost an inch of spare room. . . . [A]fter a blow to the head, the brain actually rattles around inside. . . . Processing speeds start decreasing well before age forty. . . . By age eighty-five, working memory and judgment are sufficiently impaired that 40 percent of us have textbook dementia.³

      In sum, Dr. Gawande forces us to face the truth that what happens to the human body over time is not pretty. We are all aging, and along with aging comes physical and mental diminishment. There’s no way around it, no way to stop it. Despite all the vitamins and exercise and healthy diets and strong medicines in the world, our minds and our bodies will ultimately decline and fail; we will all eventually come to the end of our days.

      Ways We Respond to Our Mortality

      There are three main

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1