LIVING WELL AND DYING FAITHFULLY: CHRISTIAN PRACTICES FOR END-OF-LIFE CARE Edited By John Swinton & Richard Payne Reviewed by Geoffrey W. Sutton “Dying is a spiritual event with medical implications,” opined Gwen London, the former director of the Institute on Care at the End of Life at Duke University (xv). I am reminded of a story about a Christian health care professional who was glad to be assigned to a pediatric ward from a geriatric ward where elderly patients were dying without having faith in Christ. She believed that God would save children from eternal damnation were they to die. Clearly, religious faith is a significant part of the identity of many people on earth. Most, if not all, religions imbue life and death with meaning. The brute fact of death has been widely studied in psychological science--especially in the context of T error Management Theory where terror refers to the awareness of one's own death.
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