Article
About four years into my teaching profession, Doris gave birth to a beautiful baby boy who died before he had lived the whole of a day. God’s face has never looked the same to me since. Because of my Calvinism, God’s face had had the unmovable serenity of an absolute sovereign absolutely in control of …
Article
Apparently from the very beginning, death has presented a problem to humankind. It is likely also that of all animals only human beings have had the equipment with which to foresee death and to try to understand it. There have usually been two problems in understanding death: on the one hand, the belief that life …
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(ENTIRE BOOK) A reformulation of the conventional notions of life after death. The author asserts that in God, the value of human existence is guaranteed and the worth of all those for whom one has cared is assured and becomes an abiding and unshakable occasion for joy.
Book Chapter
We find comfort and consolation in the sure conviction that God is always doing ‘more than we can ask or think’, as the old prayer phrases it. God will do everything possible for us human children, come what may.
Book Chapter
Dr. Kinast summarizes the interpretations which he has presented in this book and compares the relational theology of death with the more classical theology of death, assessing the strengths and limitations of each.
Article
In Life is a Miracle Wendell Berry says that in order to realize that life is an inexhaustible miracle, life must be lived within the thick particularities of “local land” and “local people.” In the midst of such a way of life, dying can be acknowledged, even if it remains a painful mystery. Amid such …
Article
About 870,000 people in the United States were diagnosed last year as having some type of cancer. Breast cancer alone was discovered in more than 100,000 women. Cancer strikes terror in the hearts of patients and their families. Though the 1984 cure rate was 52 per cent, the diagnosis frightens people, who equate it with …
Continue reading “Cancer in the Family: Roles of the Clergy”
Book Chapter
There is a special kind of connection between God and death. Everything we experience, and especially the culmination of our lifetime of experiences, is a contribution to God in the sense that it provides new occasions through which God relates to us.
Book Chapter
What is here attempted is a ‘demythologizing’ of traditional teaching on the subject of death. But the author makes it clear at the outset that he does not see such ‘de-mythologizing’ as the entire negation of the perennially Christian conviction that human existence has significance here and now and also has significance beyond this mortal life.
Book Chapter
Whenever we face unjust, sudden, accidental, unexpected death we can adhere to our pain and anger and loss, or we can place all that and all of those responsible, including ourselves, in the flow of God’s new movement. We can let death open up a new possibility for experiencing life.
Book Chapter
At the very time when life beyond death is no longer a matter of vital importance, there is an increasing emphasis on the worth of human personality, that life in itself is valuable, that human life is especially valuable, and that somehow the very grain of the universe is on its side.
Book Chapter
The author uses process thought regarding three questions concerning immortality. 1. There is no clear proof of it. 2. If there is an afterlife, what is it like? 3. Is the afterlife connected with the present life?
Book Chapter
Behind, through, and in all our existence there is a relationship with a Love which is enduring, undefeated and indefeasible, faithful in its caring and able to preserve in its own unsurpassable life all that has been worthily achieved in the created order — including all that has been worthily achieved by us humans.
Book Chapter
The author discusses two troublesome issues regarding cremation: 1. How much value is there in our bodily existence? 2. What actual conditions do our bodies have in the after life? The author concludes that cremation isn’t necessarily a sin of disrespect for we live and die as whole persons and are raised to immortal life by God alone.
Book Chapter
All existence, and particularly human existence, stands continually in a genuine relationship with God. Part of our difficulty is the unfortunate notion that the divine is not susceptible of any kind of change.
Book Chapter
We are responsible for one another. All judgment is ultimately God’s. Hell is a logical and necessary implication of freedom. We are not consigned to hell; we choose our way into hell . . . and into heaven.
Book Chapter
Biblical study, of the most exacting sort, can never answer the question of what precisely did happen, nor can it provide the evidence necessary to assure us of the specific and concrete events associated with Jesus’ resurrection, whatever they were. But we are to take very seriously indeed what the stories in the Gospels and in the earliest Christian writing and preaching were concerned to proclaim: that Jesus’ death on the cross was not the end of the matter.
Book Chapter
Dr. Kinast discusses the relational response on the success or futility of efforts to change the world. It is escapist to believe that it will all be worked out in the end times.
Book Chapter
The resurrection of Christ is a way of affirming that God has received into his own life all that the historical event, designated when we say ‘Jesus Christ’, has included: — his human existence as teacher and prophet, as crucified man upon his cross, in continuing relationship of others with him after that death, and also what has happened as a consequence of his presence and activity in the world.
Book Chapter
In process thought, God is the chief receptive agency in creation. Whatever is done, and wherever or by what or whom it is done, makes a difference to God, meaning that God is not only that One who effects things; but also is the One who is affected by things. He remains always God, yet the accomplishments of the created order are received by him into his own life, and to them he responds by making use of them for the furthering of his divine intention.
Book Chapter
Dr. Kinast explains Jesus’ death in terms of the relational view presented in this book.
Book Chapter
The inherited notions of “life after death,” with their (to many of us) impossible assertions, must be de-mythologized, or better, ‘re-conceived. The affirmation which Christian faith must make has to do with relationship with God, here and hereafter.
Article
Suicide remains a taboo subject, even though there are about as many suicides in the nation each year as there were American deaths in the entire Vietnam war. Of the 50,000 annual suicide deaths, about half are not reported as such. Even though suicide occurs with frequency and in virtually every community, I have never …
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Many Christians are vividly reminded each year at the beginning of Lent of their own mortality. As their foreheads are ritually marked with ashes, the accompanying words make the meaning of Ash Wednesday clear: "Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return." The ritual expresses one of the central convictions shared by various religious …
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Euthanasia and Physician Assisted Suicide: Killing or Caring? By Michael Manning. Paulist, 120 pp., $8.95. A Different Death: Euthanasia and the Christian Tradition. By Edward J Larson and Darrell W Amundsen. Inter-Varsity, 288 pp., $14.99. A Time to Die: The Place for Physician Assistance. By Charles F McKhann, Yale University Press, 268 pp., $30.00. The …
Continue reading “Dying Well: A Challenge to Christian Compassion”
Article
Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. By Kay Redfield Jamison. Every 17 minutes someone in America takes his or her own life. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students, and the third among teenagers. In 1995 more young Americans died by suicide than from cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia, …
Article
Like David Fisher in the award-winning HBO series Six Feet Under, when my father died, I embalmed him. My brother Pat assisted. We dressed him, put him in a box and soon thereafter buried him. Tim did the obits and drove the hearse. Eddie called the priest and did the printing. Mary handled the florals …
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Book Review: If I Should Die Edited by Leroy S. Rouner. University of Notre Dame Press, 216 pp. The essays in this anthology are loosely linked around the topic of death and afterlife, but there is no dialogue between the various points of view presented. The editor notes that there is a gap “between the …
Article
The morning news, Monday, September 27, 1976: New York city: An elderly Chinese couple today took the proceeds from the sale of their laundry — some $100,000 — ignited it into a small bonfire in their apartment (an ancient ritual investment in immortality for oneself and one’s ancestors), then with their daughter leaped from their …
Book Chapter
This book features theological questions about death, each chapter beginning with a practical case. It uses a process-relational approach and considers several different kinds of experiences of death.
Article
The recent publication of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s second book on death and dying provides an opportunity to examine the views of the American scholar most widely read and quoted on that subject. Since the publication six years ago of On Death and Dying (Macmillan, 1969), chaplains, pastors and Christian laypeople have joined other readers in hailing …
Continue reading “Is Acceptance a Denial of Death? Another Look at Kubler-Ross”
Article
America’s support for “the right to die” increased significantly during the 1980s, according to data in the National Opinion Research Center’s annual General Social Survey. Though most Christian denominations oppose the idea, support has grown in all religious segments of society. Even most “fundamentalists” now agree that “doctors should be allowed by law to end …
Article
A book about how to commit suicide has vaulted to the top of the best-seller lists. New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen admits that she picked up Final Exit out of curiosity, but kept it for another reason. The day may come when she will want to know how to die with a minimum of …
Book Chapter
The author proposes to ‘demythologize’ traditional Christian teaching about death. Since death is inescapable, we have every reason to face up to its reality and come to terms with it, so far as we are able.
Article
Three incidents illustrate the confusion that persists among many Christians who are confronted with suicide: •Five or six years ago, as I was ending a class lecture, a young seminarian rushed in from the hallway to say he had just had a call from his parish. There had been a suicide in the community and …
Article
Derek Humphry’s Final Exit, a celebration of the right to die—and a guide to how to do it—set off a furious national debate among both secularists and religionists. My recent characterization of the book as irresponsible set off a storm of mail from Century readers, many of whom believed I had overlooked the agonizing decisions …
Continue reading “Suicide, Responsibility and the Sacredness of Life”
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(ENTIRE BOOK) This book gives important insights into the theology of death. It deal with the impact of our death upon God, and how God in turn impacts our death with profound meaning.
