![The Christian Century](/themes/custom/christian_century/logo-mobile.png)
![The Christian Century](/themes/custom/christian_century/logo-desktop.png)
Since 1900, the Christian Century has published reporting, commentary, poetry, and essays on the role of faith in a pluralistic society.
© 2023 The Christian Century.
Burial with dignity
Allison Meier sees cemeteries as great repositories of cultural history—and as spaces deserving of reverence.
An Omicron Christmas
I don’t know if this is the pandemic’s end game. I do know that new things are already being born in us.
Liz Tichenor’s life in the wake of her infant’s death
We are called to accompany the bodies we love from birth to death and beyond.
The solution to the fear of death is to live as dying creatures
Theologian Todd Billings grapples with scripture, philosophy, and his own incurable cancer.
by LaVonne Neff
The coronavirus is helping us rehearse for our own deaths
“A lot of people want to talk about the big questions; they just don’t know how to get started.”
Liuan Huska interviews Lydia Dugdale
A palliative care physician writes about the mystery of faith
Sunita Puri’s memoir models the kind of compassion and wisdom she brings to her patients.
by Aaron Klink
The Christian virtues and the art of dying
9 values that can shape the end of life in a cruciform way
by Aaron Klink
Dying—and living—with breast cancer
Nina Riggs's love of the world shines through her memoir, even as the ground shifts beneath her.
by LaVonne Neff
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.
by LaVonne Neff
Jeffrey Bishop is both a physician and a philosopher. Here he turns his clinical and analytical gaze on medicine, and his diagnosis is bleak.
by Allen Verhey