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Life Worth Living is an initiative of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School.
Book Curriculum / Chapter 12
When It Ends / Death and a Life Worth Living
Ryan McAnnally-Linz is a systematic theologian and Associate Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture.
For all its certainty, death is also an enormous question mark.
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Ryan McAnnally-Linz asks “What would be worth dying for?"
We’ve all heard the cliché about death and taxes.
But for all its certainty, death is also an enormous question mark.
It’s not just that we don’t—and can’t—know what happens to consciousness when we die.
It’s that death’s meaning for us and our lives isn’t obvious. It’s something we have to reflect on, and something people disagree about in ways that matter for how we live and how we ought to live.
Lecturer at Yale College and Life Worth Living Co-Founder, Ryan McAnnally-Linz asks “What would be worth dying for?,” in this this chapter-by-chapter video curriculum series based on his bestselling book (with Matt Croasmun and Miroslav Volf), Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.
We’ve all heard the cliché about death and taxes.
But for all its certainty, death is also an enormous question mark.
It’s not just that we don’t—and can’t—know what happens to consciousness when we die.
It’s that death’s meaning for us and our lives isn’t obvious. It’s something we have to reflect on, and something people disagree about in ways that matter for how we live and how we ought to live.
Lecturer at Yale College and Life Worth Living Co-Founder, Ryan McAnnally-Linz asks “What would be worth dying for?,” in this this chapter-by-chapter video curriculum series based on his bestselling book (with Matt Croasmun and Miroslav Volf), Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.
Transcript
We’ve all heard the cliché about death and taxes.
But for all its certainty, death is also an enormous question mark.
It’s not just that we don’t—and can’t—know what happens to consciousness when we die.
It’s that death’s meaning for us and our lives isn’t obvious. It’s something we have to reflect on, and something people disagree about in ways that matter for how we live and how we ought to live.
It’s one thing, for example, to see death as release from the burdens of always-changing, always-vulnerable embodied life.
It’s one thing to embrace fearlessness because death is an illusion since the self who supposedly dies is like an illusion too—always in flux, never stable.
And it’s quite another thing to see death as the enemy of flourishing life and hope that God will rescue us from it.
Really, deeply holding some of these views would defuse our fear of death.
Some would even lead us to embrace it when the time comes.
But even if you conclude that death is a tragedy or an enemy, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should avoid it at all costs.
There’s still a vital question—one that can tell us a lot about what we believe matters most: What would be worth dying for?
Personally, I can’t be sure I would sacrifice my life if the moment called for it, but I am sure that there are causes and people I should be willing to die for.
What about you?
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