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Zusatztext Praise for Timothy Keller and his books: “A C.S. Lewis for the twenty-first century.” —Newsweek “A Christian intellectual who takes on the likes of Nietzsche! Marx! and Freud.” —The Wall Street Journal “Tim Keller’s ministry in New York City is leading a generation of seekers and skeptics toward belief in God. I thank God for him.” —Billy Graham “At Redeemer Presbyterian and in several books! Keller shaped a vision of Evangelicalism that de-emphasizes politics and stresses care for the poor! personal sacrifice! and inclusiveness across ethnicity and class.” —Fortune! naming Timothy Keller one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders” Informationen zum Autor Timothy Keller Klappentext From New York Times bestselling author and pastor Timothy Keller, a book about facing the death of loved ones, as well as our own inevitable death Significant events such as birth, marriage, and death are milestones in our lives in which we experience our greatest happiness and our deepest grief. And so it is profoundly important to understand how to approach and experience these occasions with grace, endurance, and joy.In a culture that does its best to deny death, Timothy Keller--theologian and bestselling author--teaches us about facing death with the resources of faith from the Bible. With wisdom and compassion, Keller finds in the Bible an alternative to both despair or denial.A short, powerful book, On Death gives us the tools to understand the meaning of death within God's vision of life. The Fear of Death Conscience Makes Cowards of Us All . . . that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death-that is, the devil-and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. -Hebrews 2:14-15 Death is the Great Interruption, tearing loved ones away from us, or us from them. Death is the Great Schism, ripping apart the material and immaterial parts of our being and sundering a whole person, who was never meant to be disembodied, even for a moment. Death is the Great Insult, because it reminds us, as Shakespeare said, that we are worm food. [We are] literally split in two: [Man] has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. Death is hideous and frightening and cruel and unusual. It is not the way life is supposed to be, and our grief in the face of death acknowledges that. Death is our Great Enemy, more than anything. It makes a claim on each and every one of us, pursuing us relentlessly through all our days. Modern people write and talk endlessly about love, especially romantic love, which eludes many. But no one can avoid death. It has been said that all the wars and plagues have never raised the death toll-it has always been one for each and every person. Yet we seem far less prepared for it than our ancestors. Why is that? The Blessing of Modern Medicine One reason is, paradoxically, that the great blessing of modern medicine has hidden death from us. Annie Dillard, in her novel The Living, devotes an entire page to the astonishing variety of ways death snatched the living from the midst of their homes and families without a moment's notice in the nineteenth century. Women took fever and died from having babies, and babies died from puniness or the harshness of the air. Men died from . . . rivers and horses, bulls, steam saws, mill gears, quarried rock, or falling trees or rolling logs. . . . Children lost their lives as . . . hard things smashed them, like trees and the g...
