“I can’t help letting my mind wander to the implications of Alzheimer’s disease for the theory of an immortal soul. Who wants an afterlife if the immediate pre-afterlife is spent clutching the arms of a wheelchair, head bent back at forty-five degrees, eyes and mouth wide open and equally mute? Is the “soul” that lives forever the one we possess at the moment of death… or is it our personally best soul-say, the one that indwells in us at the height of our cognitive powers and moral aspirations?” (68)<\/p>\n
This passage that Ehrenreich writes is intriguing in the context of her personal views. Previously she is known to have called herself, a “fourth generation atheist” which then leads the reader to wonder why she bothers with this consideration of the immortal soul at all if she doesn’t hold that faith. In fact she even criticizes the entire demonstration on page 69, “I got up to leave… and walk out to search for my car, half expecting to find Jesus out there in the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole.” To accept her claims with more veracity, I would like Ehrenreich to also address the reasons behind the poor’s reliance on religion as opposed to mocking their religious declarations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“I can’t help letting my mind wander to the implications of Alzheimer’s disease for the theory of an immortal soul. Who wants an afterlife if the immediate pre-afterlife is spent clutching the arms of a wheelchair, head bent back at forty-five degrees, eyes and mouth wide open and equally mute? Is the “soul” that lives […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barbara-ehrenreich"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/english-1038-spring-2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}