Beneath our ambitions, our appearances, and even our religion runs a quieter engine: the fear of death. In A Beautiful Death, Charles Curtis brings the apostle Paul's language of "the flesh" together with the insights of Ernest Becker to show how that fear shapes the way we live, in or outside the church.

He traces how we build immortality projects, climb for status, nurse our wounds, and even turn church into a hiding place. Then he shows what Jesus offers in their place. It isn't a better strategy for survival. It's a death worth dying: a new birth from above, and an apprenticeship to the One who defeated death.

Set against the larger biblical story of the Divine Council and the powers that feed on our fear, as well as Dallas Willard's teachings on apprenticeship, this is a book about learning to die well so that we can finally live.