Welcome to the Death, Dying, and Beyond Resource Page. This website arose from the work of students enrolled in REL 314: Death, Dying, and Beyond with Dr. Matthew Sayers during the Spring 2011 semester. The work found here is almost exclusively the work of the students enrolled in that class.
     The aim of the project is to provide resources and information for the public on the cultural responses to death. In their work for this class, students examined various strategies that we, as human beings, use to cope with death, the ways in which we make sense of, talk about, prepare for, and meet death, and react to the death of others. The class takes an interdisciplinary approach, examining the issues around death from many angles: religious, social, cultural, philosophical, ethical, and medical. Because the class is designed to fulfill the Disciplinary Perspectives requirement of the Lebanon Valley College curriculum, the material read in class and produced for this website reflect many different academic approaches, including Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, Sociology, Religious Studies, History, Medicine, Art History, Philosophy, Science, Music, and Law.
      This website is the result of the collaborative efforts of the entire class, working in teams of three students. Each entry on this site is the product of projects completed in the course of this class and each project allows students to approach different aspects of death and dying in our society and others. They are encouraged to draw upon their own major, the academic discipline in which they are being trained, to produce these entries. Beyond a few specific assignments given to the class by Dr. Sayers, each team determined the content of and composed each project, producing a diverse set of work on a variety of aspects of the human encounter with death. Therefore, the interests of the particular students enrolled in this class determine the content of this website. As a result the menu at the left is somewhat unevenly populated.
     Future cohorts from this same course will expand upon the work begun here in the hopes of producing a dynamic and enduring resource for those interested in the practical, theoretical, or other aspects of the human response to death.

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