‘This is my body’: Christian wisdom on dying in an age of denial
Over thirty years ago, I (1988) argued for moral and religious ways of dying in face of medicalized and psychologised death. But impediments to dying as a spiritual process have not gone away; if anything, they have become more challenging. Western Cartesian medical practices continue to sever body...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group
2021
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| In: |
Practical theology
Year: 2021, Volume: 14, Issue: 5, Pages: 467-491 |
| IxTheo Classification: | CB Christian life; spirituality |
| Further subjects: | B
Ars moriendi
B Repentance B C / communion B Religious Practice B Embodiment B Medically-managed death |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Over thirty years ago, I (1988) argued for moral and religious ways of dying in face of medicalized and psychologised death. But impediments to dying as a spiritual process have not gone away; if anything, they have become more challenging. Western Cartesian medical practices continue to sever body from soul, people from community, and health care from ecological concern. How then do those with religious convictions about soul, community, and earth justice sustain faithful ways of dying in the face of medically-managed death? How might Christians in particular reclaim the body and its mortality, especially when Christianity itself has contributed to the death denial that afflicts a vast majority of White Westerners? After evaluating the popular discussion of dying that has dominated the United States for the last fifty years, the essay ponders the silencing of religious reflection and considers ways in which practical theological scholarship and its dialogical, narrative, and practice-oriented methodologies might expand the horizons of psychologists and doctors and, with their help, offer an art of dying for Christians, chaplains, and the dying. Using the metaphor and practice of Christian Communion (‘This is my body’), the essay concludes with a few elements in a reconstituted ‘art of dying’ in a distant imitation of the Ars Moriendi that arose during the Black Death of the 1300s. |
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| ISSN: | 1756-0748 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Practical theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1080/1756073X.2021.1889766 |