Dying And The Virtues

In this rich book Matthew Levering explores nine key virtues that we need to die (and live) well: love, hope, faith, penitence, gratitude, solidarity, humility, surrender, and courage. Retrieving and engaging a variety of biblical, theological, historical, and medical resources, Levering journeys through the various stages and challenges of the dying process, beginning with the fear of annihilation and continuing through repentance and gratitude, suffering and hope, before arriving finally at the courage needed to say goodbye to one’s familiar world. Grounded in careful readings of Scripture, the theological tradition, and contemporary culture, Dying and the Virtues comprehensively and beautifully shows how these nine virtues effectively unite us with God, the One who alone can conquer death.

A renowned ethicist who himself faced death during a recent life-threatening illness, Allen Verhey in The Christian Art of Dying sets out to recapture dying from the medical world. Seeking to counter the medicalization of death that is so prevalent today, Verhey revisits the fifteenth-century Ars Moriendi, an illustrated spiritual self-help manual on "the art of dying." Finding much wisdom in that little book but rejecting its Stoic and Platonic worldview, Verhey uncovers in the biblical accounts of Jesus' death a truly helpful paradigm for dying well and faithfully.

I argue that for most patients a good death involves more than contemporary medicine can or should be expected to provide and that virtues can secure goods not provided by medicine. Currently, medical care at the end of life focuses on addressing pain and suffering, supporting independent functioning and autonomy, providing aggressive care near death when desired, and preserving overall quality of life, among other aims. When bioethicists have discussed a good death, they have argued primarily for the provision of such services and for respect of patients' autonomy. However, I argue that such circumstances are not sufficient by themselves to ensure a good death and a patient's use of autonomy will be "guided" by her conception of a good death. In many cases, a good death requires -- as a necessary if not sufficient condition -- virtues as well. At least four different conceptions of a good death, I argue, exist within American society. These conceptions imply goods that go beyond what proper medical care currently does or should provide. Next, I discuss the challenges that dying patients face in our contemporary medical and social context. What types of challenges -- and how one faces them -- will be determined partly by one's conception of a good death, though certain challenges seem more universal. I argue that the challenges associated with the loss of independence and increasing dependence on others and the nature of pain and suffering at the end of life are among our most prominent concerns. After discussing virtues in general and the place of emotions within them, I use this account to show how virtues can enable a person to die well, given a particular patient's conception of a good death. Embodying virtues such as patience, gratitude, generosity, and practical wisdom can help patients become the kinds of people who can meet some of the challenges of dying. I conclude by giving a fuller depiction of one conception of a good death rooted in the Christian moral tradition.

A Columbia University physician comes across a popular medieval text on dying well written after the horror of the Black Plague and discovers ancient wisdom for rethinking death and gaining insight today on how we can learn the lost art of dying well in this wise, clear-eyed book that is as compelling and soulful as Being Mortal, When Breath Becomes Air, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. As a specialist in both medical ethics and the treatment of older patients, Dr. L. S. Dugdale knows a great deal about the end of life. Far too many of us die poorly, she argues. Our culture has overly medicalized death: dying is often institutional and sterile, prolonged by unnecessary resuscitations and other intrusive interventions. We are not going gently into that good night—our reliance on modern medicine can actually prolong suffering and strip us of our dignity. Yet our lives do not have to end this way. Centuries ago, in the wake of the Black Plague, a text was published offering advice to help the living prepare for a good death. Written during the late Middle Ages, ars moriendi—The Art of Dying—made clear that to die well, one first had to live well and described what practices best help us prepare. When Dugdale discovered this Medieval book, it was a revelation. Inspired by its holistic approach to the final stage we must all one day face, she draws from this forgotten work, combining its wisdom with the knowledge she has gleaned from her long medical career. The Lost Art of Dying is a twenty-first century ars moriendi, filled with much-needed insight and thoughtful guidance that will change our perceptions. By recovering our sense of finitude, confronting our fears, accepting how our bodies age, developing meaningful rituals, and involving our communities in end-of-life care, we can discover what it means to both live and die well. And like the original ars moriendi, The Lost Art of Dying includes nine black-and-white drawings from artist Michael W. Dugger. Dr. Dugdale offers a hopeful perspective on death and dying as she shows us how to adapt the wisdom from the past to our lives today. The Lost Art of Dying is a vital, affecting book that reconsiders death, death culture, and how we can transform how we live each day, including our last.

Our experiences of dying have been shaped by ancient ideas about death and social responsibility at the end of life. From Stone Age ideas about dying as otherworld journey to the contemporary Cosmopolitan Age of dying in nursing homes, Allan Kellehear takes the reader on a 2 million year journey of discovery that covers the major challenges we will all eventually face: anticipating, preparing, taming and timing for our eventual deaths. This book, first published in 2007, is a major review of the human and clinical sciences literature about human dying conduct. The historical approach of this book places our recent images of cancer dying and medical care in broader historical, epidemiological and global context. Professor Kellehear argues that we are witnessing a rise in shameful forms of dying. It is not cancer, heart disease or medical science that presents modern dying conduct with its greatest moral tests, but rather poverty, ageing and social exclusion.

Although philosophy, religion, and civic cultures used to help people prepare for aging and dying well, this is no longer the case. Today, aging is frequently seen as a problem to be solved and death as a harsh reality to be masked. In part, our cultural confusion is rooted in an inadequate conception of the human person, which is based on a notion of absolute individual autonomy that cannot but fail in the face of the dependency that comes with aging and decline at the end of life. To help correct the ethical impoverishment at the root of our contemporary social confusion, The Evening of Life provides an interdisciplinary examination of the challenges of aging and dying well. It calls for a re-envisioning of cultural concepts, practices, and virtues that embraces decline, dependency, and finitude rather than stigmatizes them. Bringing together the work of sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, and medical practitioners, this collection of essays develops an interrelated set of conceptual tools to discuss the current challenges posed to aging and dying well, such as flourishing, temporality, narrative, and friendship. Above all, it proposes a positive understanding of thriving in old age that is rooted in our shared vulnerability as human beings. It also suggests how some of these tools and concepts can be deployed to create a medical system that better responds to our contemporary needs. The Evening of Life will interest bioethicists, medical practitioners, clinicians, and others involved in the care of the aging and dying. Contributors: Joseph E. Davis, Sharon R. Kaufman, Paul Scherz, Wilfred M. McClay, Kevin Aho, Charles Guignon, Bryan S. Turner, Janelle S. Taylor, Sarah L. Szanton, Janiece Taylor, and Justin Mutter

In this new book by bestselling author, Edward Sri, we discover the close connection between growing in the virtues and growing in friendship and community with others. A consummate teacher, Dr. Sri leads us through the virtues with engaging examples and an uncanny ability to anticipate and answer our most pressing questions. Dr. Sri shows us in his inimitable, easy-to-read style, that the virtues are the basic life skills we need to give the best of ourselves to God and to the people in our lives. In short, the practice of the virtues give us the freedom to love.

Many people have claimed that integrity requires sticking to one's convictions come what may. Greg Scherkoske challenges this claim, arguing that it creates problems in distinguishing integrity from fanaticism, close-mindedness or mere inertia. Rather, integrity requires sticking to one's convictions to the extent that they are justifiable and likely to be correct. In contrast to traditional views of integrity, Scherkoske contends that it is an epistemic virtue intimately connected to what we know and have reason to believe, rather than an essentially moral virtue connected to our values. He situates integrity in the context of shared cognitive and practical agency and shows that the relationship between integrity and impartial morality is not as antagonistic as many have thought - which has important implications for the 'integrity objection' to impartial moral theories. This original and provocative study will be of great interest to advanced students and scholars of ethics.

In a personal memoir, the author describes her relationships with the two men closest to her--her father and his brother, Joseph, a charismatic pastor with whom she lived after her parents emigrated from Haiti to the United States.

By mining the rich tradition of virtue ethics, Christopher Vogt uses the virtues of patience, compassion, and hope as a framework for specifying the shape of a good death, and for naming the practices Christians should develop to live well and die well. Bringing together historical, biblical, and contemporary sources in Christian ethics, Vogt provides a long-overdue theological analysis of the ars moriendi or "art of dying" literature of four centuries ago. Through a careful analysis of Luke's passion narrative, Vogt uses Jesus as the primary model for being patient in the face of death and for dying well.