back to homepage                                                                                                                                                                         back to Gallery Mainpage

Acknowledging Life and Death

        All spiritual perspectives question the meaning, purpose, and origins of life and death. Depending upon how perspectives respond, each offers ways that people can relieve suffering, deal with death, and optimize the significance of life. In a sense, all spiritual perspectives are like any healing/helping system: they offer a diagnosis of the human condition, explanations for how we came to be this way, prognoses based on different ways people live, and prescriptions for what best to do. The photos in this section of the gallery present images to help us reflect on these existential questions. They also set a context for the other sections of the Gallery that present some of the ways that various religious traditions form their worldviews, moral frameworks, and practices as spiritual healing/helping systems.
       The photos include juxtapositions of contrasting qualities of human existence: from Buchenwald concentration camp to the face of a happy baby reflecting on the world; in Croatia, from the simple beauty of a marketplace to a bombed out building; and artwork in themes that range from a sculpture representing hypocrites who persecute labor to a painting that exudes the joy of living.