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There is a common enough belief in contemporary western society that Hell is a place of punishment for those souls judged unrighteous by God. And though it may seem from Biblical passages that this has always been the prevailing view of the Church, in Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, Philippe Aries (1974) argues that this popular contemporary belief, that one’s afterlife is determined by how one lives, was not prevalent until the 12th and 13th centuries. Prior to that, Aries notes, “[t]he dead who belonged to the Church and who had entrusted their bodies to its care, went to sleep… and were at rest until the day of the Second Coming, of the great return, when they would awaken in the heavenly Jerusalem, in other words in Paradise” (1974, pp. 30–1). During that time, simply belonging to the Church corpus was sufficient for admittance to the heavenly and eternal afterlife. Aries goes on to say, “[t]here was no place for individual responsibility, for a counting of good and bad deeds. The wicked, that is to those who were not members of the Church, would doubtlessly not live after their death; they would not awaken and would be abandoned to a state of nonexistence” (1974, p. 31). In other words, failing admittance into eternal paradise did not entail the eternal sufferings of Hell, but instead, a complete, painless nonexistence.1

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Codename: GhostPhacers 1 Part One Of Monsters and Morals 5 1 Are Monsters Members of the Moral Community? 7 Nathan Stout 2 Aristotle's Metaphysics of Monsters and Why We Love Supernatural 16 Galen A. Foresman and Francis Tobienne, Jr. 3 Hunters, Warriors, Monsters 26 Shannon B. Ford 4 Team Free Will: Something Worth Fighting For 37 Devon Fitzgerald Ralston and Carey F. Applegate Part Two Life, Liberty, and the Apocalypse 47 5 What the Hell Is Going On? 49 Galen A. Foresman 6 Try Hell, It's a Democracy and the Weather Is Warm 62 Dena Hurst 7 Hunting the American Dream: Why Marx Would Think It's a Terrible Life 74 Jillian L. Canode 8 Mothers, Lovers, and Other Monsters: The Women of Supernatural 83 Patricia Brace 9 Night of the Living Dead Demons and a Life Worth Living 95 John Edgar Browning Part Three Evil by Design 109 10 Dean Winchester and the Supernatural Problem of Evil 111 Daniel Haas 11 Angels and Atheists 125 Fredrick Curry 12 Oh God, You Devil 139 Danilo Chaib Part Four It's Supernatural 151 13 Naturally Supernatural 153 James Blackmon with Galen A. Foresman 14 Masculinity and Supernatural Love 169 Stacey Goguen 15 Naturalizing Supernatural 179 Joseph L. Graves, Jr. Contributors: Bona Fide, Card Carrying Wisdom Lovers and GhostPhacers 189 Index 195