Are you looking for a new way to renew your worship, respond to the needs of the church and community, and connect with people in their passage of life--both chronological and crisis? This book offers a rich resource to you, both as a tool for worship and also devotionally as you face the deepest questions of life. Here you will find one way that the church can renew and rediscover its healing ministry. Abigail Evans, a leading specialist in bioethics and health ministries, explores how God's gift of healing is available during all seasons of a person's life and how the power of hope and healing are affirmed and redirected through liturgical services, sacraments, and rites. This distinctive resource features specific healing liturgies for injury, illness, death, separation, retirement, and a host of other major life events, from a wide variety of religious traditions.

Asserting what most Americans already suspect -- that corporate-based managed care places profits over patient care -- theologian Abigail Rian Evans points out that medical experts have reduced health care to medical treatment under arrangements with health insurance plans and HMOs. Her reasoned, practical alternative engages Christian theology, proposing a much broader concept of health care. An important contribution to a critical discussion.

Abigail Rian Evans here examines the medical, ethical, theological, pastoral, and legal issues surrounding death and dying from a Christian perspective. Her work is informed by insights from patients, their families, and health care staff and results in a book that will ably assist professionals, patients, and their families in making difficult end-of-life decisions.