A ghost chase of places of the afterlife, Vanhoutte’s brilliant intellectual history ensures we will never think about death the same way. This intellectual Baedeker of the afterlife demonstrates that how we live in and think about this life is always understood and referenced by how we think about and anticipate the afterlife.

Michael Grimshaw, associate professor of sociology, University of Canterbury

Who would expect that a hermeneutics of the afterlife would chase such ghosts as these? From Plato, Cicero, and Montaigne, to Sartre, Foucault, and Agamben, Vanhoutte charts the regions of the afterlife in a way that has not been seen since Dante. While all philosophy might be a learning how to die, strangely enough a hermeneutics of the afterlife is a learning how to live—or better, a learning about life, not only here and now, but trans-historically. This book is as serious as it is surprising, written with an understanding that surpasses both knowledge and faith. It is a revelation.

Jeffrey W. Robbins, Lebanon Valley College, author of Radical Democracy and Political Theology