Over Our Dead Bodies

In recent years, as death has silenced the critical voices of too many people important to me, I’ve found it necessary to read obituaries. Though I never took walks with philosopher Barbara Johnson (d. 2009) and her canine companion Nietzsche, lunched with “death of God” theologian Gabriel Vahanian (d. 2012), attended a jazz concert with the writer and music critic Albert Murray (d. 2013), or invited the sociologist Robert Bellah (d. 2013) to my family’s very American interfaith “Chanukmas” holiday celebration, their ideas were, as one friend wrote of Christopher Hitchens (d. 2011) in his obituary, “a central part of the landscape” of my life.