Index - Homosexuality and Alternative Lifestyles

Index to LGBTQ and Alternative Lifestyles

(res) Non-Heterosexual is the New Evolutionary Trend

(res) A Contemporary Understanding of the Bible - Part 3: Let's Talk About Trans, Gays,...

Matthew Distefano - Authored Titles

The Christian Liberation of Being Gay

Confronting Christians with a God of Love or a God of Violence

Forgive Me but I Disagree - LGBTQ Christians and Vatican Prouncements

Building Bridges of Understanding Between the Traditional Church and Gay Community

The Civil "Rightness" of Gay Marriage in the Eyes of the U.S. Constitution

"A Word to the Wise" by Progressive Christian's re: Gay Rights and Marriage

The Biblical Story of Inclusion of Who Belongs As God's People

(res) Standing with the Oppressed When It's the Right Thing To Do

America Lights Up in a Rainbow of Colors After Gay Marriage Ruling

Daniel Kirk - God and the Gay Christian (a short list of related articles)

(res) Christian Transgender Acceptance and Equality

(res) Speaking Words of Peace and Love to Gay Christians

GCN Director Justin Lee - What I Believe and Why I Believe about Homosexuality and Christianity

Carl Lentz - "This is What Church Should Look Like. It's Jesus First, Last, and Always."

Rachel Held Evans - Ask a (Celibate) Gay Chrisitan... Response

Rachel Held Evans - God and the Gay Christian, Part 4

Rachel Held Evans - God and the Gay Christian, Part 3

Rachel Held Evans - God and the Gay Christian, Part 2

Rachel Held Evans - God and the Gay Christian, Part 1

Gay Rights, World Vision, and the Evangelical Pushback to Both

A Growing Millennial Gap - An Interview with Ken Wilson on "A Letter to my Congregation" (LGBT)

(res) The Cultural Challenges Faced by Duck-Dynasty Churches

Can You Hold a Biblical View in Support of Homosexuality and Gay Marriage?

"Same Love feat:" Being Love to Those Who Are Unloved. Being a Refuge to Those Knowing None.

Exodus International Apologizes to LGBT Community

Is Homosexuality a Sin?

The Divide of LGBT Marriage Equality for the Church

The Imcompatibility of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act with the U.S. Constitution

Wendell Berry's Stunning Words on Condemnation and Hatred

(vid) Henry Rollins on "Civil Rights, Gay Marriage and American Homophobia"

GCN "Life: The World Through My Eyes" 2012 Trailers

A Christian Debate About Gay Marriage

Equal Rights for Gay Marriage and How It Affects Christian Ethos Rightly or Wrongly

Where Christianity Stands on Welcoming and Affirming

The Damage We Do When Not Accepting and Loving Gays and Homosexuals

Homosexuality: Paul and the Narrative of God's Love

Tripp Fuller on "Welcoming & Embracing"

Things Traditional Christians and Gay Christians Can Agree On...

(res) In Noble Pursuit of Peace

A Gay Christian Responds to Christ and Culture

Encountering the Monster That I Am

The Civil Rights of Gay Marriage

Gay Marriage in New York

   

Fullerisms by Tripp Fuller

I am no longer "Open & Affirming but Welcoming & Embracing."

"Why do I have to be in the bounded set of the alphabet?"

"We start playing politics with people. And with politics comes

all that it means to justify our positions."

"What does it mean to be made human anew in light of God's coming,

the gift of divine light given to all the world in Christ?"

"Gay people don't prey upon you."

"If your welcoming and embracing you're welcoming everything God made,

and every person God made, in the image of God that they are bearing."

"Rather than focusing on one type of set of people, you are

welcoming the very gift of God that God made in everyone."

"[We] are to embrace all the crap and beauty in a person's life

without ideological constraints or pre-conditions. Especially

a life that God comes into and radically transforms."

Introduction to the World of TheoPoetics

Amazon link

Theopoetics is the theory and practice of making God known,

particularly through language.

- Keefe-Perry

I  believe that how we express our experiences of the Divine

may change our experiences of the Divine.

- Keefe-Perry

Book Description

Way to Water has two primary intentions:

(i) to trace the development of the nascent field of theological inquiry known as theopoetics and,

(ii) to make an argument that theopoetics provides both theological and practical resources for contemporary people of faith who seek to maintain a confessional Christian life that is also intellectually critical.

Beginning with the work of Stanley Hopper in the late 1960s, and addressing the early scholarship of key theopoetics authors like Rubem Alves and Amos Wilder, this text explores how theopoetics was originally developed as a response to the American death-of-God movement, and has since grown into a method for engaging in theological thought in a way that more fully honors embodiment and aesthetic dimensions of human experience. Most of the extant literature in the field is addressed to allow for a cumulative and comprehensive articulation of the nature and function of theopoetics. 

The text includes an exploration of how theopoetic insights might aid in the development of tangible church practices, and concludes with a series of theopoetic reflections.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Wikipedia - Theopoetics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theopoetics

Theopoetics suggests that instead of trying to develop a “scientific” theory of God, as Systematic Theology attempts, theologians should instead try to find God through poetic articulations of their lived (“embodied”) experiences.

It asks theologians to accept reality as a legitimate source of divine revelation and suggests that both the divine and the real are mysterious — that is, irreducible to literalist dogmas or scientific proofs.

Theopoetics makes significant use of “radical” and “ontological” metaphor to create a more fluid and less stringent referent for the Divine. One of the functions of theopoetics is to recalibrate theological perspectives, suggesting that theology can be more akin to poetry than physics.

It belies the logical assertion of the Principle of Bivalence and stands in contrast to some rigid Biblical hermeneutics that suggest that each passage of scripture has only one, usually teleological, interpretation.

Whereas those who utilize a strict, historical-grammatical approach believe scripture and theology possess inerrant factual meaning and pay attention to historicity, a theopoetic approach takes an allegorical position on faith statements that can be continuously reinterpreted.

Theopoetics suggest that just as a poem can take on new meaning depending on the context in which the reader interprets it, texts and experiences of the Divine can and should take on new meaning depending on the changing situation of the individual.

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What is Theopoetics? the answer in book form

http://homebrewedchristianity.com/2014/10/11/what-is-theopoetics-the-answer-in-book-form/

by Tripp Fuller

October 11, 2014

For years (many more than you might think) this “thing” called theopoetics has been happening, occuring, bubbling-up, in various places, writings, and presentations. Those who have called their work by the title of theopoetics come from diverse backgrounds including Biblical criticism, death of God theology, postmodern thought, and process theology. Such a wealth of fields and interests encourages broad interest but at the the same time can result in students, practicioners, laypeople, and theopoets themselves lacking a connection to the wider body. Callid Keefe-Perry’s book, Way to Water, remedies this by mapping a path through the sundry strands of theopoetics past and present, all the while working to demonstrate just what theopoetics is or aims to be.

Callid skillfully summarizes the positions of early theopoetic thinkers Stanley Hopper, Amos Wilder, and Rubem Alves before moving in subsequent chapters to more contemporary versions of theopoetic thought. He works his way through the contributions of Melanie Duguid-May and Scott Holland, process theologians Roland Faber and Catherine Keller, radical theologians Peter Rollins and John Caputo, and the work of Richard Kearney and Karmen MacKendrick.

As the title suggests, Callid provides a path on the journey toward theopoetics (or a theopoetic) by gathering together some theopoetic events, examining their moments of resonance and pointing out their places of dissonance. He is careful not to coorindate theopoetic “schools” into fixed positions in relation to each other, which would be antithetical to the theopoetic project in general, but rather he treats the various thinkers/writers as bodies that might collid, slip over each other, or dance together, in the on-going effort to name and describe that which we call God.

Additionally, and importantly, the last two chapters of Way to Water indicate practical applications of theopoetics for churches and pastors. I would expect nothing less from a practical theologian, and again Callid proves wonderfully adept at parsing out how an embodied theopoetics might (and does) take shape through preaching, pastoral care, and liturgy.

Since Callid is well aware that there can be no conclusion to the infinite movement of divine rhythms, for me the end of the book unfolded into new beginnings in two significant ways:

First, Callid suggests three definitions for the term theopoetics, each textured by what Callid has gleaned from the theologians he addresses in the book. These definitions struck me as deeply personal and intimately situated in various ways, which I believe only further demonstrates an important point Callid makes in the book: the symbolic, prerational, and sensuous modes of theological discourse are not to be ignored.

Second, and very much related to the definitions he offers, Callid’s epilogue consists of a series of aphorisms intended not just to describe theopoetic work, but to actually be theopoetic writing. Here he shows us through stories and poems that, while not entirely elusive, the divine is not within our grasp, cannot be pinned down. Rather the aphorisms open the reader to the continual progression, the unfolding process of naming God, of articulating our relationship to the divine.

Way to Water provides a helpful text for those teaching or studying theopoetics for the first time, and it is accessible to non-academic readers as well. I highly recommend this book to all my pastor-type friends, as I know it will spark conversation among you and in your churches. I also recommend it my friends who might consider teaching a course on theopoetics and taking up the task of training the next generation of theopoetic thinkers.

My buddy Jeremy wrote this review and I shared it because I love Jeremy and Callid.

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What is Theopoetics?

http://theopoetics.net/

How are we to be intelligent, thinking creatures on the one hand, and faithful, trusting people on the other? One answer to this dilemma is theopoetics. Theopoetic arguments suggest that we are best served when we make room in our worldview for the beauty and mystery of life as an integral part of faith: our intelligent, rational minds certainly have a place in faithful living, but they are not sufficient in of themselves.

Asking powerful, critical questions can help in challenging ill-gotten authority, and yet to ever sink into any sense of deep joy there must be an acceptance of things we cannot understand. As we are reminded in Hebrews, “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." And so, we encounter a seeming impasse… from which theopoetics may provide another path.

Theopoetics isn’t just about verse. When a text is acting theopoetically, it functions in opposing directions, simultaneously pulling the reader further into the world of the text and pushing the reader into a reconsideration of, and reconnection to, life in the world beyond it.

Greek Derivation of the word "theo-poetic"

• [Greek] noun poema - "a created thing"
• the verb poiein - “to make”
• Theo is Greek for "God"

The English author Samuel Johnson wrote, “The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.”

Percy Shelley added, “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world.”

I work with the word theopoetics from the intersection of these ideas: theopoetics is the theory and practice of making God known, particularly through language. I believe that how we express our experiences of the Divine may change our experiences of the Divine.

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Theopoems

Amos Niven Wilder - A Hard Death

Theopoetic

by Amos Niven Wilder

Many today have difficulty in relating to religious language. This can happen when we reduce religious meaning to a specific kind of spiritual experience or give undue importance to one aspect of human life. The reduction of life to human will or intellect is often accompanied by the turn to mystical practices and cults. Amos Wilder calls for a renewal of our deep religious imagination as we reflect on biblical faith and on the basic needs and longings of contemporary persons. This requires a new appreciation for mystery and for deep-speaking-to-deep.

Wilder assumes that the depths of biblical truth have scarcely begun to be plumbed and have untapped power to renew life even in our technological Western societies. This requires that we go beyond the objective, surface meaning to the deeper orientation: Before the message, the vision; before the sermon, the hymn; before the prose, the poem. --Amos Wilder

Chapter titles

1.Theology and Theopoetic

2.The Recovery of the Sacred

3.Contemporary Mythologies and Theological Renewal

4.Traditional Pieties and the Religious Imagination

5.Ecstasy, Imagination, and Insight

6.Theopoetic and Mythopoetic

Sparks of wit and insight make Theopoetic a notable monument to the ongoing vitality of Wilder's lifelong determination to remain faithful both to the biblical witness and the imperatives of the imagination. - Journal of the American Academy of Religion

This is a wise and unpretentious book... it offers no fancy programs or catchy formulas. Its prescription for our spiritual illness, far from being some esoteric pilgrimage, is the long and unspectacular remedy of developing spiritual health. - The Christian Century

For most of his career, Amos Niven Wilder taught at Harvard Divinity School. A former president of the Society of Biblical Literature, his books remain influential in bringing together the disciplines of biblical studies, theology, literature, and mythical imagination. - Anon

---

Theopoetic Folds. Philosophizing Multifariousness

Edited by Roland Faber and Jeremy Fackenthal

A Fordham University Press Publication

Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (FUP)

This volume pursues Whitehead's notion of a "theopoetics," or, a divine becoming and multiplicity held between the conversations of continental philosophy and process theology.

Major contributors: Laurel Schneider, John Caputo, Catherine Keller, Roland Faber, John Thatamanil.

Skid Robot - Humanizing the Homeless through Graffiti

Humanizing the Homeless through Graffiti, by Skid Robot

L.A. Graffiti Artist Humanizes Homeless People By Painting Their Dreams

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/16/graffiti-artist-homeless-dreams-skid-robot-photos_n_5991808.html

The Huffington Post | By Ryan Grenoble

Those who say graffiti doesn't accomplish much haven't seen the work of Skid Robot, an anonymous street artist in Los Angeles who uses his medium to draw attention to the homeless -- a population he laments is so often overlooked.

Skid Robot humanizes the homeless by incorporating them into his art, creating scenes in which the subjects aren't just a faceless person, down on their luck. Instead, he highlights their struggle by juxtaposing them with spray painted versions of their needs, wants and dreams.

One man, recently released from the hospital and in a wheelchair, is depicted sitting in a throne atop a castle wall -- not shoeless and in a wheelchair.

 

In a caption accompanying the photo, Skid Robot explains the man's backstory, painting a portrait of a man named "Ben."

"Ben was released from the hospital with no shoes," writes Robot. "He was unable to walk as a result of being shot in the back and eventually the hospital booted him on the street like so many others."

"I offered him a meal but he declined, instead he asked for paper, pencils [and] pens so that he can write and draw. He said he really liked the art and [used] to draw himself ..."

Robot adds he gave Ben a sketchbook, a few pens and money for a meal.

Humanizing the Homeless through Graffiti, by Skid Robot

Another man, identified as "Tony," rests on the sidewalk, his unrolled sleeping pad transformed -- via Skid Robot's paint -- into a regal bed, complete with a headboard and matching side tables. "They desperately needed water more than anything," Robot writes, "so we delivered 10 gallons."

In an email to The Huffington Post, Skid Robot was adamant he's not trying to make light of his subject's situation or use them as a prop, even though his work may be seen as humorous at times.

"I'm drawing attention to a human being who more often than not is looked at as nonexistent," he said of his jarring art. "I hardly think that is using them to my benefit."

"I offer whatever help that I can, I try to get to know some of these people and give them an open ear and heart," he continued. "My message is one of compassion, to look out for those who are less fortunate and to do for others."

Skid Robot has set up a GoFundMe account for a "National Art Campaign of Compassion," which he hopes will "inspire a revolution of compassion for your fellow human being."

H/T Vice

Humanizing the Homeless through Graffiti, by Skid Robot

Humanizing the Homeless through Graffiti, by Skid Robot

Humanizing the Homeless through Graffiti, by Skid Robot

Humanizing the Homeless through Graffiti, by Skid Robot

Humanizing the Homeless through Graffiti, by Skid Robot

Humanizing the Homeless through Graffiti, by Skid Robot

Humanizing the Homeless through Graffiti, by Skid Robot

National Art Campaign of Compassion

go Fund me

A national guerilla art campain to create a dialogue for a solution to extreme poverty.

Using the power of art and film, we will tell the stories of the desperate dreamers

across the U.S. who are experiencing homelessness.

The aim of the film is to inspire a revolution of compassion for your fellow human being.

We can no longer neglect the global humanitarian crisis of homelessness and must bring

the dialouge to the forefront of public discussion and find a solution to this crisis.

We would like to travel the United States giving to those in need documenting the

entire mission.

Funds raised will be used to purchase goods for those in need and the cost of travel.

We will be constantly updating this page so please check back frequently and stay tuned!
go Fund me

The Right to Die - Not A Black and White Issue

Wikipedia - The Right to Die

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_die

The right to die is an ethical or institutional entitlement of any individual to commit suicide or to undergo voluntary euthanasia. Possession of this right is often understood to mean that a person with a terminal illness should be allowed to commit suicide or assisted suicide or to decline life-prolonging treatment, where a disease would otherwise prolong their suffering to an identical result. The question of who, if anyone, should be empowered to make these decisions is often central to debate.

Proponents typically associate the right to die with the idea that one's body and one's life are one's own, to dispose of as one sees fit. However, a legitimate state interest in preventing irrational suicides is sometimes argued. Pilpel and Amsel write, "Contemporary proponents of ‘rational suicide’ or the ‘right to die’ usually demand by ‘rationality’ that the decision to kill oneself be both the autonomous choice of the agent (i.e., not due to the physician or the family pressuring them to ‘do the right thing’ and commit suicide) and a ‘best option under the circumstances’ choice desired by the stoics or utilitarians, as well as other natural conditions such as the choice being stable, not an impulsive decision, not due to mental illness, achieved after due deliberation, etc."

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Wikipedia - Assisted Suicide

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_suicide

Assisted suicide is suicide committed with the aid of another person, sometimes a physician.[1] The term is often used interchangeably with physician-assisted suicide (PAS), which involves a doctor "knowingly and intentionally providing a person with the knowledge or means or both required to commit suicide, including counselling about lethal doses of drugs, prescribing such lethal doses or supplying the drugs.”[2] Assisted suicide and euthanasia are sometimes combined under the umbrella term "assisted dying", an example of a trend by advocates to replace the word "suicide" with "death" or ideally, "dying". Other euphemisms in common use are "physician-assisted dying", "physician-assisted death", "aid in dying", "death with dignity", "dying with dignity", "right to die" "compassionate death", "compassionate dying", "end-of-life choice", and "medical assistance at the end of life".

Physician-assisted suicide is often confused with euthanasia (sometimes called "mercy killing"). In cases of euthanasia the physician administers the means of death, usually a lethal drug. Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is always at the request and with the consent of the patient, since he or she self-administers the means of death.

Physician-assisted suicide is different from euthanasia. With physician-assisted suicide, the patient receives the medication and takes it on their own. With euthanasia, the doctor administers the lethal medication to the patient. According to several studies, more than half of the doctors polled have received requests from a patient wanting to end their life. The physicians are only allowed to prescribe the lethal medications in the states where it is legal, regardless of what the patient wants or the prognosis for their disease.

Discussion of assisted suicide centers on legal, social, ethical, moral and religious issues related to suicide and murder.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Can A Christian Support “Physician-Assisted Suicide?”

Source Link

by Roger Olson

October 18, 2014

Comments

Introduction

If you expect me to take a definite stand for or against Physician-Assisted Suicide (PAS) you will be disappointed. This blog is a place where I often reflect about difficult and controversial issues; I don’t always take a stand about them. One of my goals as a Christian theologian and educators is to help people think through doctrinal and ethical issues critically and reflectively but not always to a definite conclusion. I have been doing this within myself about the issue of PAS for years. And, as I age and face the possibilities inherent in that process, I increasingly wonder if this issue (PAS) is as black-and-white as many people, especially Christians, have thought.

What exactly is meant by PAS? Here I can only state what I mean by it. The concept has many variations. What I mean by PAS, and therefore what I am musing about, is this: A person in great suffering for which there is no available relief asks a medical professional to help him or her die in the quickest and most painless way possible. Usually in PAS the suffering person himself or herself performs the final act that immediately results in death. The physician only provides the means. However, in some cases, the physician must go further and actually use the means on the suffering person. This kind of PAS is legal in some countries and a few states—with many qualifications and safeguards against abuse.

Is Suicide a Sin?

Of course, a background theological issue, especially for Christians, is whether suicide is a sin. Most enlightened Christians, and others, will say it is at best tragic but only sin when done for purely selfish reasons and where there are other possible remedies for the emotional or physical trauma and turmoil not tried. Few enlightened Christians believe or argue that everyone who commits suicide is automatically thereby condemned to hell. That was a common medieval belief still held by only a few. The question this raises, however, is whether PAC, assuming it is a last resort, is a selfish act. One would have to ask the suffering person’s loved ones. In the kinds of cases I’m thinking about, all empathetic and reasonable loved ones would give their own right arms to see the person’s suffering cease.

So, in order to shed light on this difficult subject, it is helpful to state more specifically and clearly what kinds of cases I’m thinking of as possibly justifying PAS. Some years ago I read about an elderly mother of two adult sons who were both suffering a debilitating disease that rendered them completely paralyzed. (I remember the name of the disease; I’m just not mentioning it here to avoid a flurry of comments about it.) It was a genetic disease that often leads the person to a near vegetative state of tremendous pain and paralysis. There is no treatment for that pain and paralysis in the late stages of the disease. Her sons were confined to beds in a nursing home where she visited them daily. She watched them slowly suffering in great agony while unable to communicate let alone take care of their own automatic bodily functions. Finally one day she brought a pistol to the nursing home and shot both of them. The jury gave her ten years’ probation. I sympathized with that jury and with the mother even as I felt tremendously conflicted about her act of euthanasia.

As I have aged and I have had more contact with elderly people whose quality of life is extremely poor—down to nothing. Some people, for reasons of disease or age, come to the point where they have no quality of life. Medical provision has often kept them alive years beyond their ability to live a life of dignity and even relative physical comfort. I know elderly people who live with severe pain all the time and who cannot feed themselves or take care of their own bodies and who express the wish to die daily.

Self-Afflicted Death

Some years ago, of course, Dr. Kevorkian brought this issue to public attention in the U.S. by stepping across professional and legal boundaries to aid suffering people to commit suicide. I watched one television news “magazine” segment that focused on one of his cases. The patient was suffering the last stages (but with perhaps months to go before natural death) of ALS (“Lou Gehrig’s Disease”). The man had reached a stage where he could no longer move any part of his body except his eyelids and a finger and indicated that he was in tremendous pain that pain medicines alone could not alleviate. He requested Dr. Kevorkian’s assistance in ending his misery and Dr. Kevorkian complied by setting up a contraption the patient could use to push down a plunger to release a stream of poison into his bloodstream through an IV to which he was already connected. He died painlessly and quickly.

Some patients simply choose to forego all treatments for their terminal disease and die naturally. Usually this also involves gradually starving to death or dying by dehydration. It can take weeks. Few people blame them or even call it “suicide.” And yet, in a way, it is suicide.

Benevolent Common Practice

Some years ago I had the privilege of teaching nurses in several cohorts in a “degree completion” program. My course, which they were required to take as part of their studies, was called “Developing a Christian Worldview” and included a unit on Christian ethics. We talked about the ethical issues surrounding death including suicide. One thing that struck me was that almost all the nurses who worked in hospitals agreed that PAS is quite common. They said that in many terminal cases a doctor will order pain medicine in gradually increasing doses that eventually suppress breathing. And that so long as the doses are necessary to alleviate pain, even if they result in death, most district attorneys will not prosecute the doctors or nurses involved. They said it is one of the best kept secrets in the medical profession—given how common it is.

And yet we criminalize the same practice if it is done earlier than that and outside the context of a hospital [or home-based hospice care]. What sense does that make? Okay, well, the legal argument is that injecting someone with a dose of pain medicine strong enough to suppress breathing is not PAS so long as the intention of the act is only to relieve pain. But how different is that from other PAS the intention of which is only to relieve otherwise unrelievable pain? "Greyness" surrounds the issue at such a point.

Conclusion

I do not have all the answers to this, but I believe it is worthy of renewed discussion both among ethicists and lawmakers:

(1) First, can PAS ever be ethically justified? Let’s not begin with the worst case scenarios in which it might be abused to kill people without their consent. That’s not even in consideration here. Let’s start with the worst case scenarios of people in tremendous suffering that cannot be relieved any other way than PAS.

(2) Second, can laws be crafted that absolutely de-criminalize PAS that also guard against abuses?

click to enlarge

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Amazon link. May 2012

Publication Date: May 2012

Death is inevitable. But bad deaths those accompanied by unnecessarily prolonged pain and suffering, often aggravated by immensely costly and frequently futile medical treatments, can be avoided. This book explores the pioneering, highly pragmatic and practical work carried out by the international death-with-dignity movement over the last forty years to eliminate the last bad death. It offers clear and valuable examples of how, through frank communication with caregivers and loved ones and the use of Advance Medical Directives such as living wills, those who are facing the possibility of death in the foreseeable future, and those who help them cope, can greatly minimize or eliminate end-of-life turmoil, family dissention, and pain. It also proposes a comprehensive rethinking of end-of-life-care assumptions and a realignment of strategies to create a caring continuum to meet the rapidly expanding demands for death with dignity in the coming years.

Richard Cote' based this unique book on five years of intensive primary source research and more than one hundred in-depth interviews with death-with-dignity pioneers, activists, physicians, nurses, hospice workers, and their patients on four continents. It is written in narrative style for a general audience and intensely documented for the scholar. It illuminates the subject using 92 images and twelve hyperlinks to exclusive YouTube video interviews with death-with-dignity leaders worldwide. It explores the modern history of the death-with-dignity movement through the lives of its founders, leaders, and activists. Using personal case histories from around the world, it also portrays the often heart-breaking conflict between the final wishes of those who are living or dying in pain and the religious, medical, and laws which force them to spend their last days, months, or even years in avoidable pain and suffering against their clearly-stated will.

Drawing on the most recent scientific and medical information, it also describes the rapid evolution of legal, dignified, readily available, painless methods which the tortured and the dying can use to hasten their own death without assistance, in the company, if they choose, of their friends and loved ones.

PLEASE NOTE: this 379-page book replaces and updates Cote s 42-page 2008 technical booklet (now obsolete and out of print) titled In Search of Gentle Death: A Brief History of the NuTech Groupan end-of-life technology development organization. All of NuTech s work is now described fully in Chapter 6 of this new 2012 book.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

 

Amazon link. April 2000

Publication Date: April 2000

The strength of the right-to-die movement was underscored as early as 1991, when Derek Humphry published Final Exit, the movement's call to arms that inspired literally hundreds of thousands of Americans who wished to understand the concepts of assisted suicide and the right to die with dignity. Now Humphry has joined forces with attorney Mary Clement to write Freedom to Die, which places this civil rights story within the framework of American social history.

More than a chronology of the movement, this book explores the inner motivations of an entire society. Reaching back to the years just after World War II, Freedom to Die explores the roots of the movement and answers the question: Why now, at the end of the twentieth century, has the right-to-die movement become part of the mainstream debate? In a reasoned voice, which stands out dramatically amid the vituperative clamoring of the religious right, the authors examine the potential dangers of assisted suicide - suggesting ways to avert the negative consequences of legalization - even as they argue why it should be legalized.

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Amazon link. Fiction. April 2012

Publication Date. April 2012

Category: A Novel

While guarding an activist from an assassin, Cuddy makes himself the target

To impress his girlfriend and remind himself of his long-neglected athleticism, John Francis Cuddy is training to run the Boston marathon. But the private detective’s fitness regimen goes on the back burner when an old friend approaches him with a dangerous assignment. Euthanasia advocate Maisy Andrus has been receiving death threats, and the police are helpless to protect her. As he tries to keep the crusading lawyer alive, Cuddy realizes that the question isn’t who wants Andrus dead, but who doesn’t.

Protecting the right-to-die advocate dredges up painful memories of Cuddy’s wife, who died a slow death from brain cancer. The closer he gets to unmasking the would-be assassin, the more his old wounds open. When the killer starts taking potshots at him, as well as his client, Cuddy’s marathon training will come in handy.