This year’s edition of the Psi Symposium Annual Journal focuses on the theme of Views of the Afterlife. The first article by your Editor, “This Way to Heaven”, is a revision of a sermon that was preached from the pulpit of the First Parish in Norwell, Mass. in April 1987, and offers an overview of the implications of Near Death Experiences for the possibility of the survival of the soul or spirit after bodily death. Such experiences can never “prove” the reality of life after death (except in the mind of the beholder), but they do offer hints of what might be for others, and are of course self-validating for those who have them.

I thought it might be interesting for our readers to see what others have preached from UU pulpits on the topic of the Afterlife (of more recent vintage) and so I am pleased to share an offering from my colleague, the Rev. Dr. Judith Campbell, “Life After Death: One UU’s Perspective”, which she preached to her congregation in Vineyard Haven, Mass. in the past year. During my interim ministry at the First Parish in Bridgewater, Mass. (2000-2002) the Director of Religious Education, Joanne Giannino, gave a very interesting sermonic reflection (“Unitarian Universalism Meets the Afterlife, Now”) and dramatization (“The Afterlife Boutique”) which brought a little humor to the subject. She went on to study for the ministry at Andover Newton Theological School and was just recently ordained at her home church in Bridgewater.

Our own Shirley Pratt, the Membership Coordinator on the Psi Symposium Board, is a practicing medium, who does spirit rescue work for those who have “passed on”, but have not “moved on” to a higher spiritual plane. I asked Shirley if she would like to write a piece for this year’s Journal and she did so by responding to a recent issue of TIME magazine about the Mind and the Brain. Shirley’s response is entitled “The Spirit, the Soul, and the Mind”, which to Shirley and her guides have distinct functions and powers within the human body and inner consciousness. She fills in the missing pieces not considered by the writers of TIME magazine.

The final piece by Andrew Osborne, M.A., is perhaps the most interesting in that it combines reflections on views of the afterlife from various religious and cultural perspectives, followed by the first part of a larger novel that will be finished and published at a later date outside of the Psi Symposium Journal. Andrew Osborne grew up in the First Unitarian Society in Middleboro, Mass. and went on to study English and Creative Writing at Harvard. He worked for ten or more years in California as a film writer and film maker, and came back to Massachusetts to work on an M.A. degree at UMass. Boston. Part of his Master’s work included the study of religious and cultural perspectives on the afterlife and the first part of his novel which we are delighted to publish for our readers. Andrew Osborne is a very creative person in his own right. His Introduction to his novel includes an overview of the film industry’s attempts to deal with the subject of the Afterlife which in turn informs his attempt to deal with the same subject in fictionalized form. Building Heaven. (237 kb pdf)*

I hope you enjoy this issue of the Psi Symposium Journal whether you believe the afterlife is fact or fiction, or both, or a mystery that can never be fathomed. The wish to know the secrets of the origins and goals of life and death and the afterlife is inherent to the human spirit. The quest is endless and the road leads ever on and on.

RICHARD M. FEWKES

UUPS PRESIDENT AND EDITOR

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