James Adler's Memento Mori: An AIDS Requiem is an oratorio for soloists, men's chorus, and orchestra. It is dedicated to those who have succumbed to AIDS. A 75-minute work in nine movements, Memento Mori combines traditional English, Hebrew, and Latin texts with original prose and poetry by Quentin Crisp, Philip Justin Smith, Denise Stokes, and Bill Weaver. Memento Mori was commissioned by the Atlanta Gay Men's Chorus. Of its 1996 world premiere in Atlanta, Derrick Henry (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) wrote, "Employing an eclectic, predominately lyrical musical language, Adler writes for both chorus and orchestra with uncommon imagination."
Memento mori--Latin for "remember you will die"--refers to the practice of meditation on one's inevitable death. Encouraged by Scripture and the saints, this ancient tradition can help you to manage the chaos of this world, grow closer to God, and focus on heaven. Sr. Theresa Aletheia Noble, FSP is a religious sister at the forefront of the movement to revive this practice in the Church. She has written several resources to help people to incorporate memento mori into their daily lives. Her Memento Mori: A Lenten Devotional and the Memento Mori Journal have touched thousands of lives. Now she has compiled and written a beautiful prayer book to help people to meditate on death and the afterlife, traditionally called "the Last Things," in order to prepare for heaven. Meditation on the Last Things--death, judgment, hell, and heaven--is not a dark and depressing practice. Rather, the practice is hopeful and lifechanging. It helps people to take stock of their lives, grow closer to God, and to live with renewed purpose and fervor. May this practice open your heart to the work God wants to do in you and through you before your last day on earth, whenever that day might be. May God find us prepared!
Illustrated with 120 color and black-and-white reproductions showcasing works by George Catlin, Worthington Whittredge, Albert Bierstadt, Georgia O'Keefe and others, Plain Pictures is the first book to address representations of the midwestern prairie as a genre distinct from American western art. In a wide-ranging narrative, Kinsey argues that images of the grassland, far from being plain, offer a paradox of their own: the significance of the subject is equalled only by the struggle to express it.
An “absolutely magnificent” book (The New Republic)—the fruit of almost two decades of study—that traces the changes in Western attitudes toward death and dying from the earliest Christian times to the present day. A truly landmark study, The Hour of Our Death reveals a pattern of gradually developing evolutionary stages in our perceptions of life in relation to death, each stage representing a virtual redefinition of human nature. Starting at the very foundations of Western culture, the eminent historian Phillipe Ariès shows how, from Graeco-Roman times through the first ten centuries of the Common Era, death was too common to be frightening; each life was quietly subordinated to the community, which paid its respects and then moved on. Ariès identifies the first major shift in attitude with the turn of the eleventh century when a sense of individuality began to rise and with it, profound consequences: death no longer meant merely the weakening of community, but rather the destruction of self. Hence the growing fear of the afterlife, new conceptions of the Last Judgment, and the first attempts (by Masses and other rituals) to guarantee a better life in the next world. In the 1500s attention shifted from the demise of the self to that of the loved one (as family supplants community), and by the nineteenth century death comes to be viewed as simply a staging post toward reunion in the hereafter. Finally, Ariès shows why death has become such an unendurable truth in our own century—how it has been nearly banished from our daily lives—and points out what may be done to “re-tame” this secret terror. The richness of Ariès's source material and investigative work is breathtaking. While exploring everything from churches, religious rituals, and graveyards (with their often macabre headstones and monuments), to wills and testaments, love letters, literature, paintings, diaries, town plans, crime and sanitation reports, and grave robbing complaints, Aries ranges across Europe to Russia on the one hand and to England and America on the other. As he sorts out the tangled mysteries of our accumulated terrors and beliefs, we come to understand the history—indeed the pathology—of our intellectual and psychological tensions in the face of death.
