The focus of this volume is on ministry to the sick and dying in the later Middle Ages, especially providing them with the sacraments. Medieval writers linked illness to sin and its forgiveness. The priest, as physician of souls, was expected to heal the soul, preparing it for the hereafter. His ministry might also effect healing of bodies, when that healing did not endanger the soul. This book treats how a priest prepared to visit sick persons and went to them in procession with the Eucharist and oil of the sick. The priest was to comfort the patient and, if death was imminent, prepare the soul for the hereafter. Canon law, theology, and ritual sources are employed. Three sacraments, penance, viaticum, (final communion) and extreme unction (anointing of the sick) are treated in detail. Sickbed confession was designed to forgive the ailing person's mortal sins. A priest could absolve a dying person of all sins, even those reserved to a bishop or the pope. Viaticum was to strengthen a suffering Christian for life's last conflict, that between angels and demons for the soul of the dying person. The deathbed thus was a spiritual battlefield. Extreme unction was reserved for those in danger of death, relieving the soul of venial sins or "the remains of sin," even after confession and absolution. The commendatio animae (commendation of the soul) used with the dying was to usher the soul into the afterlife. Many works have been written about attitudes toward death, dying, and the afterlife in the Middle Ages. Likewise, there is a good deal of literature about individual sacraments. This study aims at bridging between these literatures, with a focus on the priest and parishioner in both theory and practice at the sickbed.

This pocket-sized edition of a pastoral staple will include official new rites of the Episcopal Church. Included are prayers, litanies, and other material that address medical conditions that were either unknown or not publicly talked about when the Prayer Book was revised in the 1970s. Some of these include the termination of life support, difficult treatment choices, loss of memory, and survivors of abuse and violence.

Protestant reformers sought to effect a radical change in the way their contemporaries understood and coped with the suffering of body and soul that were so prominent in the early modern period. This book examines the genesis of Protestant doctrines of suffering among the leading reformers and then traces the transmission of these doctrines from the reformers to the common clergy. It also examines the reception of these ideas by lay people.

An important examination of the theological, spiritual, and ethical issues surrounding death. At the end of a life of faithfulness comes our dying. To approach it as faithfully as we have our living calls for some serious forethought. Because one of the simplest facts of life—that we all die—seems like the most complicated thing we do. Not only have advances in medical technology saved lives, but they also have prolonged death, and raise a number ethical, moral, social, and theological issues. How far should we go to sustain life? Is it right to withdraw artificial feeding from the dying? Is it wrong to end the lives of those in pain? No matter who we are, dealing with these sorts of choices near the end of life is difficult to do on our own.Faithful Living, Faithful Dying: Anglican Reflections on End of Life Care brings together the wisdom of a task force created by the 72nd General Convention of the Episcopal Church to study what faithful living and faithful dying mean today. The task force’s reflections, published for the first time in this book, assist individuals, congregations, and the Church as a whole to disentangle the thicket of ethical, theological, pastoral, and policy concerns.

A leading historian chronicles the great contributions of the Catholic Church to hospital and health care in the U.S., with practical implications for today. The author sheds new light on medicine, religious pluralism, ethnicity, the Catholic Health Care Association and issues affecting church and health care today.

Practical theology has outgrown its traditional pastoral paradigm. The articles in this handbook recognize that faith, spirituality, and lived religion, within and beyond institutional communities, refer to realms of cultures, ritual practices, and symbolic orders, whose boundaries are not clearly defined and whose contents are shifting. The International Handbook of Practical Theology offers insightful transcultural conceptions of religion and religious matters gathered from various cultures and traditions of faith. The first section presents ‘concepts of religion’. Chapters have to do with considerations of the conceptualizing of religion in the fields of ‘anthropology’, ‘community’, ‘family’, ‘institution’, ‘law’, ‘media’, and ‘politics’ among others. The second section is dedicated to case studies of ‘religious practices’ from the perspective of their actors. The third section presents major theoretical discourses that explore the globally significant diversity and multiplicity of religion. Altogether, sixty-one authors from different parts of the world encourage a rethinking of religious practice in an expanded, transcultural, globalized, and postcolonial world.

This volume seeks to address the needs of teachers and advanced students who are preparing classes on the Middle Ages or who find themselves confounded in their studies by reference to the various liturgies that were fundamental to the lives of medieval peoples. In a series of essays, scholars of the liturgy examine The Shape of the Liturgical Year, Particular Liturgies, The Physical Setting of the Liturgy, The Liturgy and Books, and Liturgy and the Arts. A concluding essay, which originated in notes left behind by the late C. Clifford Flanigan, seeks to open the field, to examine liturgy within the larger and more inclusive category of ritual. The essays are intended to be introductory but to provide the basic facts and the essential bibliography for further study. They approach particular problems assuming a knowledge of medieval Europe but little expertise in liturgical studies per se.