Merlyn Mowrey

Merlyn Mowrey taught Social Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Central Michigan University for 30 years, retiring in 2018 as professor emerita. She first learned of Becker during her Ph.D. program at Temple University and as she continued her exploration of his ideas, she incorporated them into her research and her teaching. At CMU, Becker’s ideas enriched her courses on violence, religion, death and dying, racism, and sexism. In 2000, she came to Seattle for a weekend of presentations and over the years, she presented numerous papers at EBF conferences, applying Becker’s ideas to topics such as the danger and promise of heroism, sexism, male privilege, nature and the environment, and myth making. She has participated in several EBF projects, including the documentary Flight from Death, the “Death Anxiety in Political Messaging” project, and she has hosted two Becker/TMT conferences at CMU in 2003 and 2008. She is the author of The Religious Hero and the Escape From Evil: A Feminist Challenge to Ernest Becker’s Religious Mystification.