Patience, Compassion, Hope, and the Christian Art of Dying Well

Patience, Compassion, Hope, and the Christian Art of Dying Well combines a strong pastoral sensibility with the best of contemporary scholarship in Christian ethics to answer the pressing questions of how Christians should respond to suffering and death. 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. He then builds on that tradition by turning to the question of how the advice those authors gave to their readers must be reshaped in order to be adequate to the contemporary context. 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.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Acknowledgments Chapter 2 A Context for the Task of Dying: Christian Virtue Ethics and Dying Well Chapter 3 Dying Well in Historical Perspective: The Ars Moriendi Tradition of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Chapter 4 Competing Visions of Compassion: How Should We Respond to Suffering? Chapter 5 A Biblical Ars Moriendi: Dying Well According to Luke Chapter 6 Toward an Ars Moriendi for Our Time Chapter 7 Bibliography

About the Author :
Christopher P. Vogt is assistant professor of theology and religious studies at St. John's University, New York

Review :
For many people today "death" is close to a forbidden topic. Drawing on the riches of the biblical and theological traditions, this timely and challenging book shows how people of faith have faced the prospect of their death and explores what they can teach us about some of the most controversial issues in public debate today. With pastoral sensitivity and a no-nonsense realism, Christopher Vogt restores to us the longstanding art of learning to live well so as to die well. From a variety of resources, ”the Scriptures, late medieval texts, and contemporary ethics,” Vogt reveals the enduring relevance of patience, compassion and hope for helping us to face the inevitable prospect of death. Through those indispensable virtues, he graciously dares to restore death's Christian meaning with a humility and a humanity that makes this first work both credible and timely. Modern medical technologies provide an armory of weapons against death but not the wisdom to use them well. This book revives the lost art of dying, in a pastorally sensitive yet theologically sophisticated way. It will be an asset not only to scholars but to all who wonder how to integrate their own inevitable experience of death with a Christian life well-lived. This is a wise and discerning study, highly recommended for Christians who live with the dying and risk memento mori, remembrance of their own mortality. [Vogt] intends to recover the insights of the ars moriendi tradition not as a historic relic but as a counterpoint to the often isolated, antiseptic, detached, impersonal, and lonely contemporary experience of dying…[Vogt]'s book is certainly timely. It also taps deeply into our fundamental need to die with dignity, with hope that our suffering has meaning, and with care from those who do not regard our loss and diminishment as a burden. Because of his sensitivity to these issues [Vogt] has written an important book. This synthetic work brings together various Christian traditions on death. Pastoral ministers who care for the dying will find it useful in their training and professional development.