Death, Dying, and the Afterlife by Mark Berkson

Death, Dying, and the Afterlife: Lessons from World Cultures by Mark Berkson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This covered a variety of topics about death without going into a great deal of depth on any of the topics. For example, Berkson gave an entire lecture each to the Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist, and Confucian concept of death and death rituals (6 lectures total). I see why that's important but the course is already a summary of the concept and experience of death in human society. Throwing in summaries of all the world's religions - mostly information of which I was already aware- didn't leave a lot of time for everything else about death. I also felt like the lecture on vegetarianism- again, something I've read about at length in other more through sources- was really not to the point.

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The Analects by Confucius

The Analects by Confucius


This is a great translation. I only compared it to one other but it far exceeded the other translation. The language in the Analects is clear and then followed by short paragraphs to explain the missing context or the connotation of particular Chinese words. I enjoyed the number of passages focused on education and respect, though the ones about the historical politicians held less interest for me.

(I don't rate religious or semi-religious texts.)

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The I Ching or Book of Changes by Anonymous

The I Ching or Book of Changes by Anonymous


This is the strangest book yet. It’s an ancient choose your own adventure prophesy book. The prophesy are written in the form of indecipherable aphorisms. Perhaps a lot is lost in translation.

“If you abandon jaws of it all and good fortune will prevail...”

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