ABSTRACT
This essay appeals for compassion for the suffering and dying but also explores the practice of grief after death and the hope of resurrection. Drawing especially from Augustine, Ridenour begins by portraying the human body as susceptible to suffering and death as a consequence of sin, as well as to change even prior to the fall of humankind. As she goes on to show, the notion that bodies are fundamentally characterized by suffering, death, and transience is echoed by physicians such as Jeffrey Bishop and Sherwin Nuland. However, Christians also look forward to the resurrection of our bodies after death; in Bishop’s memorable words, the cadaver is an “anticipatory corpse.” But as we await the fulfillment of this hope, Ridenour suggests, we are justified in expressing grief in the face of suffering and death, and we are called to be empathetically present to those struggling with these realities. Here again she finds common ground between theology and medicine, looking first to the words and deeds of Christ and Augustine and then to the insights of Nuland, Bishop, and other medical ethicists.
