On Living with Death: Todd Billings

Last fall, I was teaching on Confucius and ancient Chinese approaches to the good life. When we started reading about burial practices and the years of grieving rites that attended the death of a loved one, my students were taken aback. The attitudes—the seriousness, the enduring presence—of death was unfamiliar to them. I asked them how many of them had ever seen a dead body, even at a funeral, and only a couple hands went up. 

The marginalization of death—its hiddenness—is strange and of course ultimately a fool’s errand. This past year, living through a pandemic has forced us to confront realities that many of us have spent years avoiding. Death is our neighbor now. And yet many of us aren’t equipped to talk or think about its presence.

Our guest today, Todd Billings, has written a bracing yet beautiful book, The End of the Christian Life: How Embracing Our Mortality Frees Us to Truly Live, published by Brazos last year. It is itself a sort of follow up to his 2015 book Rejoicing in Lament, which he wrote following his diagnosis with an incurable cancer.