For over one hundred years, the Roman Catholic Church has steadily curated a body of papal encyclicals, classic texts, and go-to answers on pressing moral issues of the day, that has come to be known as “Catholic Social Teaching.” Meanwhile, in Protestantism, mainline churches have steadily jettisoned nearly every historic Christian moral teaching in an effort to make the faith more “relevant” and progressive, while evangelicals, though still committed to Scripture, have often done little better in holding fast to the norms that used to guide faithful Christian discipleship when it came to love, war, and everything in between. However, Protestants too have a rich heritage of social teaching, if only they knew their own tradition, a heritage that dovetails on many points with Roman Catholic teaching, but is also inflected by the Reformation’s emphasis on the goods of the family and the nation.
I have written a chapter for an excellent new book called Protestant Social Teaching on death and dying. It also features essays on everything from just war theory, abortion and marriage, to taxation, the environment and the law. You can find out more on the website of the Davenant Institute, who are behind the project, and they also have links to buy the book in the UK, the US, Canada and Australia.
To dig deeper into my thoughts on how Christians should be thinking about death and dying, you could read my earlier book Dying Well.
A couple of episodes of my podcast Matters of Life and Death also discuss this book and my chapter in more depth with Rhys Laverty from the Davenant Institute who helped pull it together:
