Death and Dying

Earlier this year I published an article based on a lecture I gave at Baylor University in 2015. In it I examined contemporary Western Christian funeral rites, starting with the Latin tradition after Vatican II. The scholarship by other Western Christians was quite critical of those reforms, as I went on to be in my lecture, all of us arguing that those obsequies work at cross-purposes from the necessary eschatological proclamation that funerals are uniquely situated to convey. In other words, funerals fail not only to adequately convey an understanding of death, judgment, heaven, and hell; but they fail to do other things, too. I went on tentatively (and non-triumphalistically) to suggest that one place to look to begin to repair this damage would be to the Byzantine funeral rites.

Before that lecture and since, I have, then, maintained an ongoing interest in the practices (or, increasingly, the disturbing lack thereof) surrounding death and dying in our culture, and changing practices around funerals. I have noted on here in the past fascinating and disturbing studies--such as that of Candi Cann--which I again commend to your interest.

All this is prologue to saying that a new book just published this summer looks to deserve a place in this burgeoning syllabus on Christian obsequies: Christian Dying: Witnesses from the Tradition, eds. George Kalantzis and Matthew Levering (Cascade Books, 2018), 284pp.

The table of contents shows a wonderful abundance of Eastern Christian thought, starting with the well known patristics scholar Brian Daley looking at Gregory of Nyssa's thought on death and dying; continuing on with Marcus Plested (whom I interviewed here) looking at Orthodox practices; and then Paul Gavrilyuk looking at Bulgakov's sophiology. 

For more about this book the publisher tells us the following:

We human beings are mortal. Our lives in this world inevitably terminate in death. This reality, however, need not cause us to despair, since Jesus Christ has gone before us into the far country of death, giving us hope that this defining feature of our earthly lives is not the end, but instead is an entrance into Christ's presence and a path to the fullness of the Spirit's new creation in which God will be all in all. Christian Dying: Witnesses from the Tradition is a collection of essays containing reflections from Christian authors--whether Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant--on the meaning and appropriation of Christian hope in the face of death in conversation with a number of great voices from the Christian tradition.