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Frontmatter --Contents --Acknowledgments --Introduction --Chapter 1. Political Languages --Chapter 2. Pluralism and Boundaries --Chapter 3. Narrative Persons --Chapter 4. Mediated Closings --Chapter 5. Interstitial Speech Acts --Chapter 6. Consolidations --Index

Introduction -- Stories: a past life, no. 1 -- Life beyond life -- Stories: a past life, no. 2 -- Past lives and reincarnations -- Stories: the migratory self, no. 1 -- Transitions : from life to near death -- Stories: the migratory self, no. 2 -- A catalog of vivid near-death experiences -- Stories: sanity and a visitor, no. 1 -- Science, religion, and the languages of faith -- Stories: sanity and a visitor, no. 2 -- Survival after death : how to think and talk about the unknowable -- Stories : closures

Perhaps because we live in a time when rights are the most favored vocabularies in negotiating issues and constructing institutions, at least in the West, it is easy to miss limits on the powers of rights to do any of the things expected of them. The main argument in this article is that rights vocabularies do not refer successfully to inchoate life forms and that research into such life should be regulated by communal goods. The source of moral guidance is the set of needs in the larger human community, arguable the oldest moral map in history. On these considerations research that provides spectacular benefits to the human species may be justified even if it sacrifices infinitesimal life.

Exploring the ordinary is a reasonable and fun way to get through the day. Thomas Dumm takes the exploration along a cart path toward democratic politics, dramatizing the intersections and reciprocal influences of everyday life and political events and the forces of conformity and normalcy that shackle the ordinary. The working technique is juxtaposition, the kind of display that one finds in the store windows of, well, ordinary life in towns and cities. The pantheon of familiar figures and texts includes Emerson, Thoreau, Nixon, Disney, alien depictions, Lowi, Wolin, Cavell, the King's Two Bodies, Baudrillard, and many more, all offered as showcase for the book's main claim that the ordinary is the primary source of the democratic imagination.