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complex body of material and engages the reader in the process of intellectualediting and position taking.

doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfj039 Howayda Al-HarithyAdvance Access publication January 10, 2006 American University of Beirut

Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West. ByAlan F. Segal. Doubleday, 2004. 866 pages. $37.50.

The ambition of this book is breathtaking, and on first sight its length ismore than a little daunting. It is, therefore, a tribute to Alan Segal’s accomplish-ment that, on finishing the book, the reader wishes for more.

Segal’s basic premise seems to be that afterlife beliefs are not universal but infact correlate with the worlds in which those who hold them live. Most scholarsof religions will not find this to be a very remarkable claim, but to judge from thewriting style, Segal aims at a wider public. That audience may find the premisestartling, even unsettling. Furthermore, Segal sets afterlife beliefs in a muchwider context. As a result, the book can provide general readers with a wonder-fully thorough education. It may provide scholars with an opportunity to recon-sider a broad range of material.

The subtitle is a little misleading. The book does not provide a history ofwestern ideas of the afterlife. It concentrates on the ancient Middle East andMediterranean region. Segal actually begins “before the beginning” with a briefmention of Neanderthal evidence. Then he gives much fuller treatment to beliefsabout the afterlife in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Canaan, First Temple Judaism,Zoroastrianism, ancient Greece, Second Temple Judaism, apocalyptic texts, sectar-ian groups during “New Testament times,” Paul, the Gospels, the Pseudepigrapha,the Church Fathers, the early Rabbis, and nascent Islam.

Given such an expansive range one hardly expects the treatment always tosparkle with new insight. The view that the respective environments of ancientEgypt and Mesopotamia conditioned their religious beliefs is at least as old asThe Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Henri Frankfort, H. A. Frankfort,John A. Wilson, and Thorkild Jacobsen, University of Chicago Press, Chicago,IL, 1946). But Segal has not been afraid to take positions, even minority positions,on controversial matters. That, to my mind, is a distinctive plus. Along the way,he makes some intriguing suggestions. For example, he attributes the generalabsence of afterlife beliefs in the texts of First Temple Judaism not to a generalabsence of such beliefs in early Israel and Judah but to the presence of beliefsthat the writers and redactors wanted to suppress. Another example is the dis-tinction between belief in an immortal soul and belief in bodily resurrection,which forms something of a leitmotif. As Segal notes, in the United States thesetwo beliefs correlate strongly with liberal and conservative religiosity. He derivesthe notion of bodily resurrection from apocalyptic movements in the late Sec-ond Temple Period, when it provided compensation for martyrdom. Belief in an

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immortal soul, by contrast, was taken up by privileged, educated Jews, who usedPlatonism to formulate their Judaism and communicate it to Gentiles.

It must seem almost perverse, after more than 700 pages of text, to wish formore, but I do. Why stop with early Islam? To be sure, the terms of succeedingdiscussions of the afterlife have been set, and Segal directs his readers to booksthat take up where he leaves off. But while everyone deserves a rest, there issomething to be said for finishing the tour with the same guide. And then thereare topics left on the sidelines. For example, Segal tells us a great deal about theviews of the Tannaim and the Amoraim. What did other Jews at the time thinkabout the afterlife, not only men, but especially women? Perhaps there is notmuch evidence for their beliefs, but I, at least, would like to know what evidencethere is. Furthermore, Segal occasionally ventures broad generalizations. Thesemake for fascinating reading, but how general does he intend them to be? Forexample, he writes, “Usually cultures that practice inhumation tend to depict thedead as going underground. . . . They usually retain an image of the body whenthey imagine the posthumous self. The cultures that practice cremation seem toprefer the notion that the dead go to the sky. They may or may not retain anotion of the image of the body of the individual” (p. 188). What then are we tomake of people who do both? Hindus come readily to mind. They bury peoplenot thought to need purification in the fires of cremation, most notably at sama-dhi shrines. Does this practice fit the pattern or necessitate its modification?Hindus would certainly constitute a large number of people to exclude simply as“unusual,” that is, outside the bounds of the generalization.

If I find myself wishing for more, it is perhaps inevitable in such a long bookthat I find myself wishing for less, too. For example, I wonder whether the treat-ment of biblical texts is not too intense. It creates an imbalance between the cur-sory consideration of some cultures, such as ancient Greece, and the extremelythorough treatment—book by book, pericope by pericope—of biblical material.More importantly, I found myself wondering what possible relevance some dis-cussions had to beliefs in the afterlife, whether the depth of treatment did not attimes obscure rather than elucidate Segal’s points, and occasionally whether Ihad not in fact already read the same assertions (e.g., the last two paragraphs onp. 589).

Particularly unhelpful are Segal’s discussions of millenarianism and alteredstates of consciousness in chapters seven and eight. In chapter seven Segal com-mits himself to deprivation as a major cause of millenarian movements, thenseems to bend over backward arguing that what does not look like deprivationactually is. I began to wonder whether the word had not lost all of its explanatorypower when I read that “one could hardly call [wealthy Romans] materiallydeprived in any normal sense, but . . . ” (p. 319). Even cognitive dissonance turnsout to be “another kind of deprivation” (p. 320).

In chapter eight Segal introduces various altered states of consciousness andapplies them in interesting ways to Jewish mysticism, but his treatment is puz-zling. For the possible neurological bases of such experiences (pp. 333–336) herelies on Why God Won’t Go Away (Andrew Newberg, Eugene d’Aquili, andVince Rause, Ballantine Books, New York, 2001). Why? That book reads like a

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pop-journalistic rewrite (Vince Rause writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer), andnot a very good one, of D’Aquili and Newberg’s more substantive The MysticalMind (Fortress Press, 1999). When even Segal acknowledges that much of thechapter is a digression (p. 341), one wonders if it belongs in the book.

One last aspect about which I found myself wishing for less is the frame. Iwanted less of both its normative recommendations and its American parochial-ism. Segal concedes “There are many law-abiding members of society every-where who consider themselves fundamentalist” (p. 683), but shortly thereafterhe writes “Religious faith . . . includes doubt while fundamentalism . . . is merelyfanaticism” (p. 695). He proceeds to laud those Americans who have given upbelief in hell and opened the gates of heaven to all, regardless of religious persua-sion. Then he propounds a two-fold strategy for dealing with religious plurality:“limiting conversion to members of one’s own religion and imagining oneselfglobally as the member of a minority” (p. 695). Later he avers that the notion ofan immortal soul is the belief most suited to the modern democratic West (p. 714).(Personally, I find the word “soul” meaningless.) The final heading makes anastounding claim: “Since [religion] is fiction, we may safely believe it” (p. 724). Iwould not want that standard applied to Nazi ideology.

Segal cannot derive these views from the history that he narrates. He couldargue for them better in separate publications. Here they clearly get in the way,especially in the chapter on Islam. That chapter begins not in the ancient worldbut in New York City on September 11, 2001 (p. 639). For roughly half of thechapter (pp. 640–670) we are mostly back in a narrative of ancient history. Thenwe leapfrog to Osama bin Laden and suicide bombers (pp. 670–695). AlthoughSegal wants to teach his readers “to avoid the prejudices of seeing Islam from theperspective of its extremists” (p. 639), devoting so much of the chapter on“Islam and the Afterlife” to extremists has the opposite effect.

A related problem is an American parochialism absent from most of the text,but strongly present in the Introduction, the Afterword, and much of the chap-ter on Islam. Perhaps Doubleday has determined that patriotism sells and has noambitions to market the book outside the United States. Perhaps Segal added theframe in reaction to the attack on the World Trade Center. (He seems to havefinished the book just prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003; see p. 690.)Perhaps neither could have envisioned a reviewer, especially one writing for theAmerican Academy of Religion, reading and writing (temporarily) in Europe.Nevertheless, it is difficult—in fact, embarrassing—to read about “the distinc-tively American hereafter” which “validates quintessentially American values inthis life” (p. 715). There is nothing distinctively American about the views of theafterlife that Segal discusses. On the one hand, they derive from thinkers wholived around the Mediterranean in antiquity; on the other, they exclude manyAmericans, not only fundamentalists but also recent Asian immigrants, frombeing essentially American. Here Segal simply advances a triumphalistic Jewishand Christian liberalism. Nor does the United States have a distinctive claim onvalues which are widely shared by people on many continents. Either Segal hasnot recognized what it means to “imagin[e] oneself globally as the member of aminority,” in this case an American, or the possibility that members of a minority

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might be parochial and self-righteous means that such imagining does not fosterpluralism as much as Segal thinks.

It is a shame that Segal framed the book as he did. It is a thorough andthought-provoking study that stands well on its own.

doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfj040 Gregory D. AllesAdvance Access publication January 10, 2006 McDaniel College

The Lion and the Lamb: Evangelicals and Catholics in America. By WilliamM. Shea. Oxford University Press, 2004. 402 pages. $35.00

The divide between Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants in Americasurprises nobody. Imagining each other as demonic and politically subversive,the two communities have generated animosities that are well known and wellresearched. Surely, it seems, these two shall never meet peacefully until the LastJudgment clarifies precisely which side God favors. William Shea (Center forReligion, Ethics and Politics, College of the Holy Cross) contributes anotherstudy of this dichotomy and its conflicts. While this is familiar territory in Americanreligious studies, Shea’s approach and conclusions prevent this work from beinga rehash of the usual suspects.

Shea juggles both historical and theological arguments, so the book offersneither a straight historical account nor solely theological reflection. Heattempts an honest “historical-theological” study wherein the historical recon-struction of the past proceeds uninhibited and then yields its fruits for quite spe-cific theological speculation. For him the two disciplines are simultaneouslyindependent and intertwined. This methodological through media alone makesthe book unique. Shea also asserts that the positive contributions each sidemakes to the broader Christian community suffer needlessly from the constantfixation on the opponent’s diabolical otherness. So, far from being mortal ene-mies, Catholics and Evangelicals might benefit from listening to, not attacking,each other. Additionally, Shea asserts the necessity of considering the modernperspectives inspired by the Enlightenment since both Christian groupsresponded to its presence.

Shea considers these three “tribes” inspired by mythological understandingsof their own past. He launches his inquiry with reflection on the 1993 meeting“Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” The event’s participants’ willingness tolook beyond the history of mutual condemnations inspired Shea to review thatvery past. Both made absolute claims about Christian truth, its sources, and thetrue community confessing it. Both sides rejected modernity for its corrosiveattitude toward revealed truth: evangelicals enthusiastically supported theprosecution in the Scopes Trial, and the Catholic Church weeded out modernistclerics until the 1950s. Shea notes some differences, but concludes both reac-tions were mistaken. Instead, he thinks, the “best instinct of Catholicism andAmerican evangelical Protestantism has been to embrace, support, expand on,

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