A Christian ethicist's personal search for a better way of dying.
Everyone dies. Not everyone dies well. Modern medicine has reconceived death as something to be defeated and forestalled at any cost yet too often this leads only to sterile, lingering death, in which the sick and aged approach eternity surrounded by technology and experts rather than family and friends, by people more attentive to the latest lab reports than to the task of dying well and faithfully. In The Christian Art of Dying Allen Verhey a renowned ethicist who himself faced death during a recent life-threatening illness sets out to help the church recapture dying from the medical world. Searching for a better way of dying, Verhey revisits the fifteenth-century Ars Moriendi a spiritual self-help manual on the art of dying. Finding much wisdom in the illustrated little book but rejecting its stoic and Platonic worldview, Verhey turns finally to the accounts of Jesus death on the cross, in which he discovers a truly useful paradigm for faithful dying a contemporary Christian ars moriendi.
