Patience, Compassion, Hope, and the Christian Art of Dying Well

Patience, Compassion, Hope, and the Christian Art of Dying Well combines a strong pastoral sensibility with the best of contemporary scholarship in Christian ethics to answer the pressing questions of how Christians should respond to suffering and death. By mining the rich tradition of virtue ethics, Christopher Vogt uses the virtues of patience, compassion, and hope as a framework for specifying the shape of a good death, and for naming the practices Christians should develop to live well and die well. Bringing together historical, biblical, and contemporary sources in Christian ethics, Vogt provides a long-overdue theological analysis of the ars moriendi or "art of dying" literature of four centuries ago. He then builds on that tradition by turning to the question of how the advice those authors gave to their readers must be reshaped in order to be adequate to the contemporary context. Through a careful analysis of Luke's passion narrative, Vogt uses Jesus as the primary model for being patient in the face of death and for dying well.