dying

Allison Meier sees cemeteries as great repositories of cultural history—and as spaces deserving of reverence.

I don’t know if this is the pandemic’s end game. I do know that new things are already being born in us.

We are called to accompany the bodies we love from birth to death and beyond.

Theologian Todd Billings grapples with scripture, philosophy, and his own incurable cancer.

“A lot of people want to talk about the big questions; they just don’t know how to get started.”

Sunita Puri’s memoir models the kind of compassion and wisdom she brings to her patients.

We gave our readers a one-word writing prompt: “promise.”

9 values that can shape the end of life in a cruciform way

Nina Riggs's love of the world shines through her memoir, even as the ground shifts beneath her.

We gave our readers a one-word writing prompt: “surprise.”

A hospice chaplain writes about facing pain without flinching.

Dying poses hard questions about autonomy.

Even in the secular imagination, dying has become a vocation.

The difference between sickness and health depends on the strength of the love at work. It wasn't until I met Mark that I began to understand this.

Whether we're dying or living with grief, there are faithful ways to do so. Marilyn Chandler McEntyre points us in the right direction.

Modern medicine makes it difficult to die. Often, treatment seems to prolong not living so much as dying. With no earthly hope, Regan was spared all this.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison comes under the category of “Books to Be Read on an Annual Basis”—like Augustine’s Confessions, King Lear, or anything by Flannery O’Connor. In general, we read too many books and return to too few.

On April 13, 2005, Richard Lischer's 33-year-old son, Adam, phoned his dad. The cancer had spread throughout Adam's body.

Jeffrey Bishop is both a physician and a philosopher. Here he turns his clinical and analytical gaze on medicine, and his diagnosis is bleak.