In The Next World: Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife (White Crow Books, 2022), historian of religions Gregory Shushan explores the relationships between extraordinary experiences and beliefs in life after death. He first shows how throughout history and around the world, near-death experiences have influenced ideas about the afterlife. Shushan also takes a deep dive into the problem of similarities and differences between NDE accounts. Not only do they vary widely, but so does a culture’s way of responding to them and integrating them into their belief systems.
In this book, Shushan also compares NDEs with accounts of shamanic spirit journeys to afterlife realms, intermission states between reincarnations from people who remember past lives, and descriptions of otherworlds by souls of the dead communicating through mediums. Accounts of all these phenomena bear striking similarities to NDEs, though they also have significant differences. Examining them each in relation to the other results in a kind of reciprocal illumination in which each type of extraordinary experience sheds light on the other.
Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India.
What to know about what could be a massive overhaul in the presidential election season: why President Biden is reportedly calling for a change.
Also, Congress' final decision on a deal to avert a rail strike and a new development in the Justice Department's investigation into documents found at former President Trump's home.
Plus, what's behind a big drop in gas prices, why the rapper Ye was suspended from Twitter again, and how one celebrity decided to pay it forward in his hometown.
Those stories and more news to know in around 10 minutes!
The widespread protests against the Chinese government are the most extensive since Tiananmen Square in 1989. The demonstrations are against both the severe zero-COVID policies and Xi Jinping’s rule. But the consequences of protesting in China are harsh. Andy speaks with two China experts, Xiao Qiang at the University of California Berkeley and Michael Beckley at Tufts University, about whether COVID rules will loosen, why these protests could mark the start of an even more authoritarian era, and what a coming crackdown on the Chinese people might look like.
Keep up with Andy on Post and Twitter at @ASlavitt.
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President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program is headed to the Supreme Court. While the plan is blocked for now, the justices will hear arguments in February to decide whether the administration has the authority to cancel federal student loan debt for millions of borrowers.
Crooked’s new workplace advice podcast “Work Appropriate” covers everything from how to deal with pushy bosses, to the systemic issues that plague many industries. Host Anne Helen Peterson tells us how a period of burn-out made her think differently about the world of work.
And in headlines: survivors of the Uvalde school shooting sued law enforcement agencies in Texas over their response to the massacre, a federal appeals court dismissed the “special master” in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, and the Senate passed legislation to block a nationwide rail strike.
Crooked Coffee is officially here. Our first blend, What A Morning, is available in medium and dark roasts. Wake up with your own bag at crooked.com/coffee
Live Action Founder and President Lila Rose started her undercover work as a teenager, posing as an underage victim of sexual abuse seeking an abortion — but with a camcorder hidden in her blouse to document her conversations with Planned Parenthood workers.
Since then, Live Action has amassed 6 million social media followers and 1.7 billion lifetime video views. And Live Action says their testing has found that Live Action’s content has changed the hearts of 43% of those the organization surveyed on abortion.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Rose for a Daily Signal interview, during which she shared that she had done a lot of acting in high school and found it natural to empathize with the plight of a girl grappling with an unexpected pregnancy and to pose as this victim, sent by her abuser to do away with the baby.
"I'm 15," Rose said she told the worker. "He's much older than me, 24. What do I do? I'm pregnant."
"In the state of California, that should immediately trigger mandatory reporting," she explained. "But the Planned Parenthood worker, without blinking, told me to lie about my age in the paperwork to get a secret abortion, and no one would know anything."
Rose believes the abortion industry wants to perpetuate negativity around motherhood.
"Planned Parenthood is not interested in women having their babies and they're certainly not doing anything to support those women," she said. "They're interested in women killing their children."
But the Live Action founder also emphasized that modern society faces an existential crisis in which people fail to realize that true happiness comes from relationship with others.
"We're all seeking happiness, but we think we're going to find it in career or we're going to find it in fame or wealth or some sort of material thing when really it can only be found in people," she explained, noting that the ultimate person through which people will find happiness is God. "And so we reject our own children because they're a threat to happiness when really they're actually a key to happiness."
During the massive protesting that took place following the leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion indicating that Roe v. Wade would soon be overturned (and in the months since then) I have frequently heard pro-abortion protestors say that abortion is necessary to allow them to have consequence-free sex.
Dating back to the Arab Spring, Twitter’s potential for real-time organizing has been a selling point. But trying to find information on China’s “Zero COVID” protests reveals just how vulnerable the now-understaffed platform is to manipulation.
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It's a bit of a good news show! The Respect for Marriage Act has passed the Senate! Justice Alito was ratted out by a Rev. Schenck. And, the 11th Circuit delivered a whopper of a decision putting an end to the Judge Cannon Naro Lago nonsense.