Heart failure, accident, or murder? John Shuck interviews Hugh Turley about the mysterious death of Thomas Merton.

For years I have spoken out about how fishy the official story of Thomas Merton’s sudden death smelled to me.  I have also, over the years, met three CIA agents who were present in Southeast Asia at …

Seldom can one predict that a book will have an effect on history, but this is such a work. Merton’s many biographers and the American press now say unanimously that he died from accidental electrocution. From a careful examination of the official record, including crime scene photographs that the authors have found that the investigating police in Thailand never saw, and from reading the letters of witnesses, they have discovered that the accidental electrocution conclusion is totally false.

We continue the presentation we began in the last column, here offering:

Thesis #8 – The entire array of individual and collective defense mechanisms are regularly employed to maintain individual and social/cultural equanimity in reaction to actual threats of injury, death, and annihilation, and also in reaction to imaginative or symbolic threats of injury, death, and annihilation. Such defense mechanisms probably originated in, but certainly were strategically contoured in their contemporary form by the need for anxiety control in the face of mortality awareness. In short, our highly developed intelligence caused the anxiety problem in the first place, and also comes forth with at least the provisional solution to the anxiety problem.

The show that’s all about two basic questions: 1) What leads to a good death? – and 2) What does that tell us about how to live a good life? Hosts Andrew Chirch, David Greenson, and Jessica Shine bring their different perspectives to an exploration of death and life. Funny, bittersweet, sad, and sometimes amazing.

Did Jesus really rise from the dead? Or is this a fairy tale?

This issue, along with who God is, could keep the twenty-first-century reformation from moving forward.

Thesis #7: Just as there are individual defense mechanisms, likewise, there are collective defense mechanisms, habitual patterns of collective behavior aimed at defending against threats to established social formations. Each of these mechanisms may manifest itself in both creative and destructive forms.

Suicide is now on the top ten list of causes of death in America. It is time for us to get honest about the social isolation that leads to a sense of worthlessness, of not being needed, of not belonging anywhere. While we do need to support mental health practitioners and access to appropriate medications but the most effective treatment for depression, the most effective way to prevent suicide is a combination of maintaining close friendships and the habit of exercising in sunlight for at least 30 minutes every day. Ultimately, we should be mature enough to accept that the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland was right: We are all mad here. Because we are all damaged in some way, we should be honest about the fact that we need one another (and we need to exercise in natural light).

How does the death of Jesus 2000 years ago save me? What is the substitutionary doctrine of the atonement?