In the movie Ikiru, directed by Akira Kurosawa, an aging bureaucrat discovers he has stomach cancer and is propelled into an existential crisis by the realization that he has wasted his life engaged in a meaningless job.  This revelation opens him up, however, to a constructive act:  he sets to work transforming a stagnant pond...Read More

During the Middle Ages, a popular image of the stages of life in Roman Catholicism was of a mandala with Christ in the center and the different ages of man represented as spokes around that hub (see my post on The Stages of Life and the Liturgy of the Hours).  With the dawning of the...Read More

In Roman Catholicism there exists a daily pattern of prayer, where specific prayers are linked to particular times of the day, a practice which dates from Medieval times. This cycle of prayer is typically undertaken by those in a monastic order. Some adherents believe that this Divine Office, as it is also called, reflects not...Read More

Hesiod was a Greek poet who lived and wrote during the time of Homer (between 750 and 650 B.C.E).  From his writings we have one of the first developmental theories, not about the individual stages of life, but rather about how humanity develops over time.  He believed there were five ages of humankind, four of...Read More

Charlotte Bühler (1893-1975), was a German developmental psychologist who was a founder of humanistic psychology, but whose views on the human life cycle are less well known compared to the theories of Piaget, Freud, and Erikson.  She nonetheless made a unique contribution to the study of the life stages with her emphasis on how the...Read More