Ritual and Practice
Ritual and Practice
M. Therese Lysaught argues that, whereas rituals and practices had played important roles in the art of dying from the Middle Ages until the early twentieth century, today they are ambiguous concepts on unsteady footing within secular biomedicine. Society has lost the rituals and practices that helped to guide patients and their communities through the dying process. Lysaught turns hesitantly toward bioethics for a solution. She draws on earlier work by the bioethicist Daniel Callahan, whose vision for a new art of dying turns on a person’s character. Lysaught shows how “the formal, procedural logic embraced so passionately” by present-day bioethics cannot offer a robust solution without undergoing substantial changes to its own framework. All is not lost, however, and Lysaught leaves the reader with some practical steps for working toward an art of dying.
Keywords: Ritual, Practices, Community, Character, Dying process, Virtue ethics
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