Fyodor and the Foxhole
Or, the search for meaning in a meaningless life.
“In the end, we’ll all become stories.”
—Margaret Atwood, Moral Disorder and Other Stories
A death row inmate without a God
“Show me something real,” Hancock said to Moss. “Tell me something true.”
Phillip Hancock, 59, was a death row inmate in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. Devin Moss was his chaplain, a spiritual care advisor who had been working with Hancock for a year. On November 30, 2023, at 10 A.M., Hancock was to be executed via lethal injection. Without faith—an atheist—he was trying to find meaning in his life and in his death, trying to make sense of death without God.
Hancock grew up religious in Oklahoma City, not devout but a believer. He went to a Methodist church with his parents and attended Baptist Bible School in the summer. He cared for his little brother who suffered from cerebral palsy. He and his mother had escaped from his physically abusive father. In a car salvage lot near the church he visited with his parents, he and his friends would often smoke weed and cigarettes. The toughness of his childhood, the unfairness of it all, sometimes made him question his faith—the crucifix ever-present in his bedroom.
In April 2001, Hancock killed two men, J and L. J had been supplying drugs to Hancock’s then-girlfriend, which led to an argument between the three men. In self-defense, as Hancock claimed, he shot the two men with a gun he had wrested away from J. Hancock evaded capture for a year until being booked for a different charge.
In 2004, Hancock was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. He entered the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, a place where more than 200 people have been executed since 1915. It is where Tom Joad had been incarcerated after being convicted of homicide in self-defense, in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. While Tom Joad got out, Phillip Hancock had no such luck.
In prison, as missionaries started paying him visits, Hancock turned to books as a way to understand his situation. He wanted to read, learn, and debate, which is what he did with the others in the prison, arguing with empathy with his proselytizing visitors. As time went on, his faith turned to dust. Whatever the messengers of faith were selling, he wasn’t buying.
“I decided, it makes more sense to me to hate a God that does not exist than to be slave to one. The weight of the world came off of me. Because I wasn’t concerned about this maniacal, narcissistic, omnicidal psychopath,” said Hancock. His appeal of his death sentence was denied by a court in 2007.
As Emma Goldberg writes in the NYT article, Hancock’s atheism led him to a difficult question: What could sustain him day by day—through rage and grief and fear of his looming execution—without faith in a power mightier than the people who had decided to end his life?
A suicidal man and a little girl
In 1877, Fyodor Dostoevsky published a short story in his monthly journal, A Writer’s Diary. The story was called “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” and dealt with a suicidal narrator discovering the meaning of life in a dream.
It began with the protagonist meandering through the gloomy streets of St. Petersburg as he slowly slipped into nihilism. Feeling the “terrible anguish” of the apparent meaninglessness of life, he contemplated committing suicide as he looked at the lone star in the night sky.
Suddenly, a little girl of about eight, dressed in destitute clothing, grabbed him by his arm and begged for help. But he shooed her away and returned to his room which he shared with a drunken old captain. He fell deep into thought in his miserable room—the room that barely had anything, but it had a drawer and the drawer had a gun, an “excellent gun” he had bought two months ago—and found himself haunted by the little girl’s image.
“I should certainly have shot myself, but for that little girl,” he thought.
He felt a moral dilemma: If someone hit him, he would feel pain; just as if something pitiful happened, he would feel pity; and if he felt pity for the child, then he should’ve helped the child, just like he would’ve before he fell into his current state of despair.
“Why did I not help the little girl, then?” He asked himself.
Because when the little girl was pulling at him, a question arose before him, making him angry.
“If I had already made up my mind that I would put an end to myself to-night, then now more than ever before everything in the world should be all the same to me. Why was it that I felt it was not all the same to me, and pitied the little girl?”
He wondered why he felt pity and shame at all if he was going to kill himself anyway. If soon he would cease to exist, why then did anything matter to him at all?
This existential thinking excited him, saving his life.
“One strange consideration suddenly presented itself to me. If I had previously lived on the moon or in Mars, and I had there been dishonored and disgraced so utterly that one can only imagine it sometimes in a dream or a nightmare, and if I afterwards found myself on earth and still preserved a consciousness of what I had done on the other planet, and if I knew besides that I would never by any chance return, then, if I were to look at the moon from the earth—would it be all the same to me or not? Would I feel any shame for my action or not?”
“The questions were idle and useless, for the revolver was already lying before me, and I knew with all my being that this thing would happen for certain: but the questions excited me to rage. I could not die now, without having solved this first. In a word, that little girl saved me, for my questions made me postpone pulling the trigger.”
Leo Tolstoy and his existential crisis
Two years after Anna Karenina—his fame and legacy already cemented—Leo Tolstoy wrote about his existential crisis in his memoir A Confession. He fell into a deep spiritual crisis, a depression he likened to a serious physical illness that made him contemplate suicide and the meaning of life.
He lost all passion for his work, and all meaning in his fame which he once so longed for. Afraid he might take his own life, he stopped going out shooting with his gun. How could he go on living? He asked in deep anguish.
“One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid,” he confessed in his memoir.
He thought he could simply bear out his existence if he could be certain that life had no inherent meaning but he couldn’t do so. He felt like a man lost in the woods, rushing to find a way out but only further confusing himself—the more he tried to find a way out, the more lost he found himself. The only final way out, it seemed, was to kill himself.
Yet he found the question to be quite simple, “the simplest of questions,” a question without an answer to which one could not continue living.
“‘What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?’ Differently expressed, the question is: ‘Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?’ It can also be expressed thus: ‘Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?’”
Paralyzed by this simple question, he searched for answers, first in science then in philosophy, both of which disappointed him—for science asked its own questions and answered those without worrying about his questions, and philosophy merely asked the same questions in more complex forms without giving any answers.
“Why does everything exist that exists, and why do I exist?” Tolstoy asked himself, then answered his own question, “Because it exists.”
An atheist chaplain
Devin Moss, 11 years younger than Hancock, had a religious upbringing in Idaho, going to a private Christian school. But Moss had always been a curious person, questioning others about the practicality of biblical tales.
After high school, he joined the Marines, and took Catholic confirmation classes during boot camp as an excuse to evade his drill sergeants. He then enrolled in a film degree program at the University of Texas at Austin where he wrote scripts about existentialism. He studied philosophy, eventually realizing that existentialists made more sense to him than the Christian teachings of his youth. Eventually, he no longer believed in God but still looked for “a sense of spiritual purpose.”
Moss started a podcast on spirituality and death called “The Adventures of Memento Mori” where one guest, a Buddhist chaplain, told him he’d make a good chaplain.
Moss enrolled at a theological school in Chicago in 2019 in a new program for humanists, then did a residency as a chaplain at a New York hospital. He graduated in 2022.
Unsure what he could do as an atheist chaplain, his path intersected with that of an atheist death row inmate from Oklahoma: Philip Hancock.
Hancock wanted a chaplain who did not believe in God and his lawyers reached out to the American Humanist Association.
In early 2023, Devin Moss wrote in a letter to Philip Hancock: “Hello sir. How are you doing? It would be an honor to be by your side in spiritual support for these next months—be it a prayer, meditation, an existential ponder, a cry and even a joke. I want you to know that you are not alone.”
During one of their first calls, Hancock presented his existential dilemma to Moss.
“I want more than anything to believe in something other than this. I just can’t do it though, lacking evidence,” said the inmate to the chaplain.
Yes to life
“Let us imagine a man who has been sentenced to death and, a few hours before his execution, has been told he is free to decide on the menu for his last meal. The guard comes into his cell and asks him what he wants to eat, offers him all kinds of delicacies; but the man rejects all his suggestions. He thinks to himself that it is quite irrelevant whether he stuffs good food into the stomach of his organism or not, as in a few hours it will be a corpse. And even the feelings of pleasure that could still be felt in the organism’s cerebral ganglia seem pointless in view of the fact that in two hours they will be destroyed forever.”
The above is a passage from Viktor Frankl’s book Yes To Life: In Spite of Everything, a collection of lectures he gave in 1946—eleven months after he was liberated from a labor camp in Nazi Germany. Frankl was a psychiatrist who spent 3 years in concentration camps, losing his father, his mother, his brother, and his wife to the horrors of those camps.
In spite of this, he writes—
“The fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.”
The day of execution
On November 30, 2023, Philip Hancock was pronounced dead at 11:29 in the morning. Fourteen minutes ago, he had been given a lethal injection: a three-drug cocktail of midazolam for sedation, vecuronium bromide to halt respiration, and potassium chloride to stop the heart. During those fourteen minutes, Devin Moss stood at his feet telling his slowly dying friend, “You are loved. You are not alone,” over and over and over.
The night before his death, Hancock was brought his last meal: white meat from Kentucky Fried Chicken. Hancock had asked for dark meat.
Driving under the gray Oklahoma skies, Moss arrived at the prison at 7:35 in the morning. The Governor had denied clemency that morning despite the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board’s ruling in favor of granting clemency to Hancock.
Moss still wondered what he could offer Hancock. For the two men, there was no God, no hell or heaven, no prayer or salvation. As a chaplain, all he could offer was his company, his presence to the man being crucified.
Emma Goldberg writes in the New York Times article, “There is an adage that says there are no atheists in foxholes—even skeptics will pray when facing death.”
“It’s well known that people that really believe, that really have faith, die better,” Moss had said. “How can we help people die better that don’t have supernatural faith?”
Moments before the execution, as Hancock laid tightly strapped to a gurney in the tiny chamber, Moss rested his hand on Hancock’s knee, and recited from his notebook, “We call the spirit of humanity into this space. Let love fill our hearts. We ask that in transition into peaceful oblivion that Phil feels that love, and although this is his journey that he is not alone. We invoke the power of peace, strength, grace and surrender. Amen.”
A wakeful dream
In The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, as Dostoevsky’s suicidal protagonist sat thinking about the little girl that had saved his life—merely by the act of asking for help which he did not provide yet felt pity for the girl and shame at his apathetic self—he fell into a strange, almost psychedelic, sleep.
He dreamed of taking his revolver and pointing it at his heart. He waited for a second. Two seconds. Then pulled the trigger.
He felt no pain but everything in him felt convulsed and everything around him suddenly extinguished. “I became as though blind and numb, and I lay on my back on something hard,” he said.
He was surrounded by noise but couldn’t make any himself. Suddenly, a break. He realized he was being carried in a closed coffin. As the coffin swung, he came to a breaking realization: he was dead.
“I know it and do not doubt it; I cannot see nor move, yet at the same time I feel and think. But I am soon reconciled to that, and as usual in a dream I accept the reality without question,” said the Ridiculous Man.
Soon he was buried in the ground. Alone, he stayed there still for a while; a while being hours or days, there was no way to tell.
Suddenly, a drop of water fell on his closed left eye, then another, and another. Every minute a drop fell and all of a sudden, his heart filled with a deep indignation, and then he felt pain. Physical pain in his heart.
“It’s my wound,” he thought. “It’s where I shot myself. The bullet is there.”
“And all the while the water dripped straight on to my closed eye. Suddenly, I cried out, not with a voice for I was motionless, but with all my being, to the arbiter of all that was being done to me.”
“Whosoever thou art, if thou art, and if there exists a purpose more intelligent than the things which are now taking place, let it be present here also. But if thou dost take vengeance upon me for my foolish suicide, then know, by the indecency and absurdity of further existence, that no torture whatever that may befall me, can ever be compared to the contempt which I will silently feel, even through millions of years of martyrdom,” he cried out.
Deep silence. Another drop fell. Then, the grave opened.
Four ways to live without meaning
Tolstoy, deeply depressed, failed by both science and philosophy in his quest to find answers to his existential despair, turned desperately to spirituality.
He wondered how others in his social circle dealt with the existential anguish of their conscious beings and found four strategies that at best helped manage the hopelessness but none resolved the deeper question.
The first strategy was that of ignorance. He writes, “It consists in not knowing, not understanding, that life is an evil and an absurdity. From [people of this sort] I had nothing to learn—one cannot cease to know what one does know.”
The second strategy was epicureanism—to make use of the advantages one had while knowing the hopelessness of life, by “disregarding the dragon and the mice, and licking the honey in the best way, especially if there is much of it within reach.” That was the way, Tolstoy felt, most people in his circle lived. They had more advantages than hardships and their lack of morality allowed them to forget their privileges were merely accidental. “The accident that has today made me a Solomon may tomorrow make me a Solomon’s slave,” Tolstoy wrote in A Confession. He realized that such people forgot that the tides of fortune eventually turn and the pleasures of today still lead to sickness and death.
“The third escape is that of strength and energy. It consists in destroying life, when one has understood that it is an evil and an absurdity. A few exceptionally strong and consistent people act so. Having understood the stupidity of the joke that has been played on them, and having understood that it is better to be dead than to be alive, and that it is best of all not to exist, they act accordingly and promptly end this stupid joke, since there are means: a rope round one’s neck, water, a knife to stick into one’s heart, or the trains on the railways; and the number of those of our circle who act in this way becomes greater and greater…”
The fourth category of people, which Tolstoy found himself in, used a strategy of weakness; clinging to life despite being aware of the reality of the misery. He felt that people in this category knew that death was better than life but didn’t have the strength to act rationally and simply end their lives, to end the deception, seemingly waiting for something. “The fourth way was to live like Solomon and Schopenhauer—knowing that life is a stupid joke played upon us, and still to go on living, washing oneself, dressing, dining, talking, and even writing books,” he wrote.
In his book Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, Frankl presented a thought experiment comparing the game of life to the game of chess. If a chess player, faced with a chess problem she cannot solve, chooses to simply hurl the pieces off the chess board, does that solve the chess problem? It does not.
Analogously, such is the behavior of the suicide, he wrote: to throw life away as a solution to the insolvable problem of life was to merely flout the rules of the game of life.
Frankl writes, “The suicide also flouts the rules of the game of life; these rules do not require us to win at all costs, but they do demand from us that we never give up the fight.”
Tolstoy—tormented and repulsed as he found himself in the fourth category—wondered why he hadn’t yet killed himself. He realized that a part of him questioned his own ideas on the hopelessness and meaninglessness of life.
He wrote, “It was like this: I, my reason, have acknowledged that life is senseless. If there is nothing higher than reason (and there is not: nothing can prove that there is), then reason is the creator of life for me. If reason did not exist there would be for me no life. How can reason deny life when it is the creator of life? Or to put it the other way: were there no life, my reason would not exist; therefore reason is life’s son. Life is all. Reason is its fruit yet reason rejects life itself! I felt that there was something wrong here.”
God has nothing to do with this
“Where my enemies at?” Hancock said jokingly during his last words before the cocktail of death coursed through his body. “I don’t want anyone out there crying for me. You, Sue—I don’t want you doing that,” Hancock said. Sue Hosch was an anti-death penalty activist who had become friends with Hancock.
To the other witnesses in the room, which included the families of the two victims and the state’s attorney general, he said one final time that he had acted in self-defense and still hoped to be exonerated after his death.
After Hancock’s death, as the finality of the moment hit Moss, he murmured an involuntary prayer, praying for a better set of cards for whatever it was that came next for his departed friend.
The families of the victims said they hoped Hancock had gotten “his soul right” with God before his death. They were grateful for the justice God’s will had brought.
Moss sat in his car and began crying as the Oklahoma skies pummeled rain down on the morbid land of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary.
At one moment in the past, in an outrage, Hancock had said to Moss, “The good Christians are going to strap me to a crucifix and put a nail in my vein? Do they really think that their God approves of them?”
Moss and Hosch wrote letters to Hancock and threw them into a fire in place of a funeral. There was no funeral.
In his final message to his friend, Moss had originally written “spirit of the divine.” He chose to cross out “of the divine” before he delivered his final words to him. That day, as he drove away in the rain, he said, “God has nothing to do with this.”
There is but one solution
In her 1826 novel, The Last Man, Mary Shelley wrote, “There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others.”
She had written the novel during a period in her life when she saw the deaths of three of her children as well as the death of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had drowned in a boating accident.
James Baldwin once wrote, “I think all of our voyages drive us there; for I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.”
Two atheists in the foxhole
In February 2023, Philip Hancock—the death row inmate—said to his atheist chaplain, Devin Moss, “I tend to get adrenaline rushes when I think about this because I’m so angry. They’ve stolen my life from me.”
During his time in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, Hancock found comfort in poetry and songs.
“If it comes down to it, I’m maintaining my dignity. I’ll make them ashamed to be scared when it’s their turn to die. They’ll say, ‘We’ve got to hold our heads high, like Hancock,’” Hancock said to Moss. Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” was one of Hancock’s favorites.
During their time together—mostly over the phone—Hancock and Moss discussed childhood stories, philosophy, and biblical tales. Was Hancock the class clown? What did the Buddhists think? Discussions of Cain and Abel.
Wondering what it was that Hancock was seeking, Moss asked him once, “Why did you feel it was necessary to get a spiritual care adviser for this part of your life?”
Hancock’s initial motive was simple—that Moss would be able to be in the execution chamber, he explained, due to a 2022 Supreme Court ruling that allowed the presence of spiritual care advisers during a death row inmate’s execution. Hancock wanted someone next to him to ensure nothing went wrong during his execution.
In the New York Times article, Emma Goldberg writes, “He talked worriedly about Oklahoma’s 2014 botched execution of Clayton Lockett, who after his injections began to writhe, declaring that his body felt like it was ‘on fire.’ He had a heart attack in the execution chamber.”
He wanted him next to him, Hancock told Moss. “I like you man. You’re a nice person. I think you’re sincere,” he told Moss over the phone.
Hancock had found his sense of purpose in his battle for clemency and survival. “I’m not done yet, like I said—I love life. I’m going to fight to the bitter end of this,” he said.
Moss started visiting Hancock in person in July, where they sat for hours in the visitation room along with Sue Hosch—the anti-death penalty activist who had become Hancock’s friend.
Hancock was touched that Moss had flown from Brooklyn to McAlester to visit him; their laughter felt more genuine to them when they sat inches apart from each other.
The situation became clearer to Moss as to what he was offering—Hancock did not believe in God but he did believe in what people can do for each other. This relationship with Hancock was what Moss was offering.
In August, Moss decided to move to Oklahoma so he could spend more time with Hancock in prison.
“Hey Devin, man, you’re blowing me away. You’re showing me something I haven’t seen from—I don’t recall anybody really coming through like this,” said the inmate to the chaplain.
They would often talk about the legal case as Hancock and his lawyers prepared for a clemency hearing before the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board. They presented new evidence that Hancock had acted in self-defense: testimony from Hancock’s ex-girlfriend that she had asked J to “take care of” Hancock.
Despite much opposition from the state, the board still voted, 3-2, to recommend clemency but the final decision rested with the Governor.
Two years before the board’s recommendation, the Governor had said that he claimed every square inch of Oklahoma for Jesus Christ. The Governor had until the hour of the execution to stop it.
Tolstoy and the simple folk
After questioning his own nihilism, still searching for answers, Tolstoy found hope in the “very simplest folk.” He wondered how most people—simple people outside of his intellectual circle—lived lives and never questioned the absurdity of life.
He wrote in A Confession, “My knowledge, confirmed by the wisdom of the sages, has shown me that everything on earth—organic and inorganic—is all most cleverly arranged—only my own position is stupid. And those fools—the enormous masses of people—know nothing about how everything organic and inorganic in the world is arranged; but they live, and it seems to them that their life is very wisely arranged!”
He questioned his own ignorance, suddenly realizing the fact there might be something he didn’t know. He realized that there was an entire humanity that had lived and still lived as if it understood the meaning of life, “for without understanding it could not live; but I say that all this life is senseless and that I cannot live.”
Further questioning himself and his thinking, he asked what he had never asked before: “But what meaning is and has been given to their lives by all the milliards of common folk who live and have lived in the world?”
Tolstoy realized that if he wished to understand the meaning of life, he was not going to find the answers from people who had lost all meaning and were off killing themselves, but instead from the billions of people who still lived, and who had lived before, that “support the burden of their own lives and of ours also.”
He realized that the billions of “simple, unlearned, and poor” people did not fit into his four categories.
“I could not class them as not understanding the question, for they themselves state it and reply to it with extraordinary clearness. Nor could I consider them epicureans, for their life consists more of privations and sufferings than of enjoyments. Still less could I consider them as irrationally dragging on a meaningless existence, for every act of their life, as well as death itself, is explained by them. To kill themselves they consider the greatest evil.”
It appeared to him that all of such humanity already had some “pseudo knowledge” of the meaning of life which remained unacknowledged, even despised, to his rational mind.
Two Russians discover the meaning of life
As the protagonist’s grave opened in Dostoevsky’s The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, he found himself taken by some dark being. They were in space, in deep darkness, far from the earth. After an unquantifiable amount of time, the protagonist saw the sun and an overwhelming emotion took over him.
The protagonist narrated, “A sweet and moving delight echoed rapturously through my soul. The dear power of light, of that same light which had given me birth, touched my heart and revived it, and I felt life, the old life, for the first time since my death.”
He found himself in a different world that looked like Earth but was full of light and full of happy people.
“Oh, instantly, at the first glimpse of their faces I understood everything, everything!” He exclaimed.
Tolstoy, in his meditations on life, realized the answer was to be found in faith. Faith, not religion, not God. Just faith. He understood that faith was irrational knowledge and that to accept the idea of faith was to reject the rational mind. But if rationality was rejected then what was the purpose of meaning since it was the rational mind that required a meaning to live?
“My position was terrible. I knew I could find nothing along the path of reasonable knowledge except a denial of life; and there—in faith—was nothing but a denial of reason, which was yet more impossible for me than a denial of life,” he wrote.
He found himself stuck in a contradiction: Either what he called reason was not as rational as he thought, or what he called irrational was not as irrational as he thought.
“Faith still remained to me as irrational as it was before, but I could not but admit that it alone gives mankind a reply to the questions of life, and that consequently it makes life possible,” said Tolstoy.
He went on, “In contrast with what I had seen in our circle, where the whole of life is passed in idleness, amusement, and dissatisfaction, I saw that the whole life of these people was passed in heavy labour, and that they were content with life. In contradistinction to the way in which people of our circle oppose fate and complain of it on account of deprivations and sufferings, these people accepted illness and sorrow without any perplexity or opposition, and with a quiet and firm conviction that all is good,” he wrote comparing the intellectual minds of his circle to the “simple folk” that lived life and found meaning in faith.
Tolstoy realized that if he wished to understand life and its meaning, then he “must not live the life of a parasite,” but instead live a real life, and—“taking the meaning given to live by real humanity and merging myself in that life”—verify it.
In his book Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, Viktor Frankl wrote, “It is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life—it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us—we are the ones who are questioned! We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential ‘life questions.’”
As Dostoevsky’s protagonist slipped out of his dream at dawn, he felt renewed with a newfound gratitude for life. “Rapture, ineffable rapture exalted all my being,” he wept as he arose.
He had realized the meaning of life in his dream, that everyone—from the wisest man to the lowest murderer—aspired to a singular shared goal. In his dream, he had seen the truth that all men on earth can be beautiful and happy, and that evil could not be the normal condition of man.
He proclaimed again and again that he did not merely invent this truth but actually saw it. He had seen what had been true all along. And the truth was simple: “The one thing is—love thy neighbor as thyself—that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live.”
What is real? What is true?
During the time they knew each other, Moss would often ask Hancock questions he himself had been trying to figure out as a chaplain, like where humans should find their moral compass.
Hancock would come to the same realization as Mary Shelley’s protagonist and Dostoevsky’s protagonist, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That’s it in a nutshell. That’s it.” God had nothing to do with it.
Once, when Moss asked Hancock what he thought happened when a person died, Hancock replied, “Nonexistence didn’t bother me before I existed. I don’t think it’s going to bother me after I’m dead.”
On November 30, 2023, in the tiny execution chamber, Devin Moss, as a chaplain and as a friend, concluded his final message to Philip Hancock with—
“In the beginning of this, when I asked what you really wanted out of a spiritual care adviser, it was Philippians Chapter 4. Show me something real, show me something true.”
“What is real is that you are loved. What is true is you are not alone,” said the chaplain, his final words to the inmate.
Sources & Further Readings
Article: An Atheist Chaplain and a Death Row Inmate’s Final Hours, by Emma Goldberg (The New York Times, 2024).
Short Story: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Book: A Confession, by Leo Tolstoy.
Book: Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, by Viktor E. Frankl.
Blog: The Marginalian, by Maria Popova. [especially, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy]
This! “Faith still remained to me as irrational as it was before, but I could not but admit that it alone gives mankind a reply to the questions of life, and that consequently it makes life possible." Thank you for this beautiful piece.
What a wonderful piece!