Teaching Death and Dying: A Pastoral Theological Approach
Teaching Death and Dying: A Pastoral Theological Approach
This chapter explores the teaching of death and dying from a religious perspective, namely a Christian theological one. While death is a universal human experience, interpretations and responses to death and dying—emotional, physical, cognitive, and spiritual—are conditioned by the deepest religious convictions of the one who is dying and the ones who are grieving the coming or recent loss of another to death. Within schools of theological education students need to learn not only psycho-social frameworks for understanding loss, death, and grief as a human phenomenon, but they need to examine the religious tradition's distinctive interpretations of death within the larger divine story of creation, redemption, and resurrection. The chapter concludes that when students clarify their own personal and theological convictions about death and resurrection, they are more able to offer themselves and the resources of the Christian tradition in support of others who are grieving or dying.
Keywords: pastoral care, theology, Christian perspective, grief and loss, student experience
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