Here’s something a little different: Joseph Bottum has written a very long and fascinating essay about politics, culture, and why our understanding of death is critical to both. A short excerpt to whet your appetite:

“Society rests on the death of men,” the Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once declared. He probably intended nothing more than a sour comment on the mass of humankind: that violent, childish, unpleasant crew, never to be fully trusted. But it seems, nonetheless, a curious formulation. In what sense could society rest on the death of men, rather than being damaged or threatened by human mortality?

There are too many movable parts for all this to come clear in an instant. It’s like one of those giant jigsaw puzzles, thousands of pieces scattered across the table—except we’ve lost the box they came in and can’t quite remember the picture they’re supposed to make.

Bottum sees great spiritual and cultural significance in the way we approach the fact of death within our communities, and in the way we consider the continuing influence of the departed. As Christians, we have a unique idea about the place of death in the cosmos. A bit of a morbid topic, perhaps, and the essay is not a fast read, but it certainly got me thinking about an important subject that I naturally tend to avoid.