Immortal organs: Spirituality in the resurrected lives of organ transplant recipients

At the heart of the scholarly critique of organ transplant is an unshakeable conviction that the zeal for transplantation stems from a misguided endeavour to resist death indefinitely and unnaturally. Based on ethnographic research with recipients about the religious or spiritual import of their transplant, this article argues that the immortality organ recipients seek is not a simple hunger to live longer but a complex rendering of eternal life founded on embodied experiences of illness and transplant and the social networks these experiences give rise to. Post modern medicine does not solve the problem of death, but it does contribute to new understandings of life after death.