Inventing Afterlives: The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Life After Death

Why is belief in an afterlife so persistent across times and cultures? And how can it coexist with disbelief in an afterlife? Most modern thinkers hold that afterlife belief serves such important psychological and social purposes as consoling survivors, enforcing morality, dispensing justice, or giving life meaning. Yet the earliest, and some more recent, afterlives strikingly fail to satisfy those needs.

In Inventing Afterlives, Regina M. Janes proposes a new theory of the origins of the he...