“Aging” is not what it used to be. More persons live a healthy and long life. Many will have to face aging as gradual decline. With improved sanitation, greater food safety, and more powerful medicine, we avoid many problems that used to be customary. Techno‐optimists envisage further moves, not just avoiding “premature” death, but extending the human lifespan. In December 2012, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 47: 710–34 published a set of articles on transhumanism, with Hava Tirosh Samuelson arguing in “Transhumanism as a Secularist Faith” that transhumanism secularizes traditional religious themes and endows technology with religious significance.

The ethicist Gilbert Meilaender begins much closer to ordinary human life in our time. We certainly should try to treat diseases, when possible cure them, and thus expand the average lifespan. But should we consider “aging” itself a disease, to be approached in the same way? If life is a good thing, why not aspire to have more of it? As biological organisms, finitude and a life‐cycle is natural. But using our reason freely to transcend our limitations makes us human. Meilaender offers questions and humane challenges to the ambition of life extension. And cautiously, he speaks of a Christian vision of life eternal, of the restless heart longing for God. He argues that an immortality worth wanting needs a large and rich context of belief and practice, and not just endless life as such. In the context of such a wider perspective, the finitude of our lives is a blessing as it allows for healthy relations between generations and a valuable sense of completion. Indefinite life‐extension would change relations between generations. One type of fulfilling experiences, the encounter between generations (parents and children, teachers and students) would change beyond recognition, and so would the feature underlying the existence of generations: sexuality. Indefinite life‐extension would also change the experience of a flow of time, of patience and of endings—of stories and much else. And it would undermine the possibility of a fullfilled life cycle, a completeness that accepts the incompleteness of one's life.

Given that life is finite, this brief book that raises many questions in an evocative way is very valuable. Old age may be a normal, special and significant stage of life. As he quotes the poet John Hall Wheelock, “Old age is the hour for praise,” Meilaender invites us to love the finite human life.