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Description
What do we experience when we die? Steven W. Tyra surveys the historical approaches to this question in this comprehensive book that traces to the idea of the “afterlife” from the early church to modernity.
Tyra builds upon specialist scholarship to provide an accessible introduction to the variety of afterlives imagined by the Christian tradition. Historically, Christians have painted the period between bodily death and the final resurrection in wildly contrasting hues, from sojourns in a subterranean Elysium to the fires of Purgatory. Along the way they have been forced to grapple with questions posed by our mortality. What precisely is a human being, and does she continue to be one even after her body lies in the dust? What is the relationship of body and soul? Do the dead continue to have knowledge of (or worse, meddle with) the affairs of the living?
The answers given by the Christians of centuries past confound modern intuitions and fail to fall within the expected confessional lines. From John Calvin's so-called defective doctrine of Purgatory to the unorthodox views of C.S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, Tyra delves into a variety of contexts.
Ultimately, this book will show Protestants of today how to draw upon a rich past; how to reflect on these alternative, and sometimes pernicious, stories about what a human being is and what awaits us after death.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- EPUB 3.0
- Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
- WCAG level AA
- WCAG v2.2 compliant
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
- No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
- Has alternative text descriptions for images
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Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
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Rich content
Language tagging provided
Table of Contents
2. Early Christian Afterlives
3. Medieval Afterlives
4. Reformation Afterlives
5. Tudor and Stuart Afterlives
6. Evangelical and Enlightenment Afterlives
7. Literary Afterlives
8. Living Human Beings
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | 26 Nov 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 224 |
| ISBN | 9780567719577 |
| Imprint | T&T Clark |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |

























