Eternal salvation is not a goal worthy of our aspirations and it cannot even in principle redeem any forms of social injustice, since it would eliminate our freedom and any sense of who we are.

Spinoza presents a clear version of what I call the religious aspiration to eternity.

I try to imagine how the wind may feel and how the landscape may appear for the seagull. Of course, I will never know what it is like to be a seagull.

This Life addresses both religious and secular audiences. I invite the religious (and the religiously inclined) to ask themselves if they actually have faith in eternity and if this faith is compatible with the care that animates their lives. Furthermore, I encourage both religious and secular readers to see why the finitude of our lives should not

If the brevity of my lifetime were not an issue for me, the temporal length of an activity could not be experienced as an imposition.

“If it does not absolutely transform his existence for him, then the individual is not relating himself to an eternal happiness; if there is something he is not willing to give up for its sake, then he is not relating himself to an eternal happiness.”

analytical definitions are the following. What I call social democracy comprises any form of socialism or Marxism that limits itself to redistribution and does not grapple with the fundamental question of value in the mode of production. Democratic socialism, by contrast, requires a fundamental and practical revaluation of the capitalist measure of

Being Martin is not a final identity but consists in striving to be Martin, striving to maintain or transform the relations of priority among my practical identities in the form of an existential identity.

we need to pursue a revaluation that acknowledges our finite lifetime as the condition for anything to matter and for anything to be valuable.