Between Life And Death From Despair To Hope

Dr Kashyap Patel is a renowned oncologist in the US who works with terminally ill cancer patients. Through him, we meet Harry, who, after a life full of adventure, is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. As he stares death in the face, Harry leans on Dr Patel, an expert in understanding the process of death and dying. His questions and fears are addressed through the stories of many other patients that Dr Patel has treated-from the young and vivacious to those who had already lived full lives, from patients who could barely afford their rent to those who had been wildly successful. What ties these stories together is the single thread of the lessons Harry learns along the way, lessons that ultimately enable him to plan his own exit from the world gracefully-dying without fear.

A New York Times Bestseller A Wall Street Journal Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year A New Statesman Book to Read From economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, a groundbreaking account of how the flaws in capitalism are fatal for America's working class Deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism are rising dramatically in the United States, claiming hundreds of thousands of American lives. Anne Case and Angus Deaton explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. This critically important book paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline, and provides solutions that can rein in capitalism's excesses and make it work for everyone.

“To prepare yourself to make difficult medical decisions in a distinctly Christian way, you won’t do better than to read Between Life and Death.” —Tim Challies Modern medical advances save countless lives. But for all their merits, sophisticated technologies have created a daunting new challenge, namely a blurring of the expanse between life and death. The dying process is often hidden behind a complex web of medical terminology, statistics, and ethical decisions, making it difficult for patients and loved ones to know how to approach the end of life in a dignity-affirming, Godhonoring, faith-filled way. This book offers a distinctly Christian guide to end-of-life care. It equips readers by explaining common medical jargon, exploring biblical principles that connect to common medical situations, and offering guidance for making critical decisions. In these pages, readers will find the medical knowledge and scriptural wisdom they need to navigate this painful and confusing process with clarity, peace, and discernment.

“[A] landmark book . . . Solnit illustrates how the uprisings that begin on the streets can upend the status quo and topple authoritarian regimes” (Vice). A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of activists at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of our times in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book. “One of the best books of the 21st century.” —The Guardian “No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that’s marked this new millennium.” —Bill McKibben, New York Times–bestselling author of Falter “An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways.” —The New Yorker

In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the “right to die”—or to live. The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, informed by Foucault’s genealogy of medicine and power as well as by a thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion—people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts—has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual “medicine.” The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to “spiritual surveys,” to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo’s, The Anticipatory Corpse explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. This book is a ground-breaking work in bioethics. It will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy.

The Hope and Despair of Human Bioenhancement is a virtual dialogue between Transhumanists of the “Oxford School” and the thought of Joseph Ratzinger. Set in the key of hope and despair, it considers whether or not the transhumanist interpretation of human limitations is correct, and whether their confidence in the methods of human enhancement, especially through biotechnology, corresponds to genuine hope. To this end, it investigates the philosophical foundations of transhumanism in modernity’s rejection of metaphysics, the triumph of positivism, and the universalism of the theory of evolution, which when applied to anthropology becomes the materialist reduction of the human person. Ratzinger calls into question this absolutization of positive reason and its limitation of hope to what human beings can produce, naming it a pathology of reason, a mutilation of human dignity, and a façade of a world without hope. In its place, he offers a richer concept of hope that acknowledges our contingence and limitations.

Verbal Transformation, Despair, and Hope in The Waste Land argues a prosodically explainable literary case regarding how a hidden phenomenon of verbal transformation serendipitously turns the conspicuous message of despair into the message of hope hidden in the text of The Waste Land.

When unmourned experiences of helplessness and disavowed desires turn into a passive fatalism, people stop hoping for the best and fear the worst, despairing that the real world has anything good to offer. This can lead individuals to memorialize past sufferings through psychological symptoms and compulsive repetitions. Dr. Shabad discusses how patients, after many years of living a life limited by resentment, fear, and despair, can come to terms with their childhood experiences: a mother who can never be satisfied, a father who consistently buries his head in the newspaper. He explains how people can overcome hardships endured and losses suffered. The authentic spontaneous dialogue between therapist and patient provides the generosity and courage necessary to shed their now obsolete defenses and mourn what cannot be remedied or replaced. Rich clinical material demonstrates how mourning can bring about self-acceptance, and set individuals free to take responsibility for and live out their own personal truths. This is a deeply felt, and beautifully written tribute to the redemptive power of psychotherapy and to the regenerative capabilities in all human beings.