Can learning about ghosts help us cope with pandemic losses? aubreyjwhelan spoke with Penn professor Justin McDaniel. He says the answer is yes.
Justin McDaniel, a professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, teaches a popular course called “Gods, Ghosts and Monsters,” a comparative religion course about death and the afterlife. He’s long been fascinated with ghost stories — and why they fascinate us.
The pandemic has forced many of us to confront death on a larger scale than ever before. How has that changed the way people think about belief in an afterlife? Other students were moving home, living with grandparents or combined with family members in one house for safety. They were really seeing the world as a very threatening place and isolating place.
And then the stories coming out of different religions really helped with long-term emotional strife. Not one story is ever going to give you an answer, but they allow you to see how emotions are expressed in many different forms.There are lots of reasons — we can look at it as a psychological coping mechanism for loss. Or social pressure: If everyone else believes it, why don’t I? There’s a Marxist interpretation of ghost stories, that people in power are manipulating us and making us afraid.
The probable thing is that when you die, your body slowly disintegrates and is part of the atoms of the universe again. But it’s much more interesting if your uncle, grandmother, or sister is someone who can still touch your life after they’re gone.
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