Ageing and Dying in a Broken World: A Discussion with Ashley Moyse

In today’s episode, Claire is speaking with Dr. Ashley Moyseabout his book Resourcing Hope for Ageing and Dying in a Broken World Wayfaring Through Despair which came out in 2024.

For those captive to the broken world of late modernity,wherein ageing and dying persons become vulnerable to despair, this book offers a diagnostic of such despair. It also resources the practices of a realistic, humanising hope that might enable a strength for person to journey with and forothers, together, through such despair. Thus, by addressing the aetiology of despair experienced by people confronting ageing, frailty and dying, and drawing upon the writings of Gabriel Marcel, among others, Ashley Moyse reveals the problematic life of a broken world with its functionalising metaphors, instrumentalising reasoning and objectifying desires that offer no hope at all. It is a broken world where despair generates behaviours that anticipate harm or other, often tragic, outcomes that impede or greatly curtail or even completely inhibit human flourishing. Resisting despair, but living through it, Moyse presents the activity of the moral life, demonstrating a way persons might be resourced through an intersubjective and reflective pedagogy, with its habits or practices that enable a humanising hope, liberating human beings to become those readied to confront the actualities of human living and dying, and encouraged to grow and develop as 'wayfarers', hopefully.

Dr. Ashley Moyse is a Canadian (born and raised in Estevan, Saskatchewan) whose scholarly work tends to be found at the intersections of theology, philosophy, and medicine/health care. At present, he is the Associate Professorof Bioethics in the Department of Religion at Baylor University. Dr. Moyse is concurrently a Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, a Research Associate at Vancouver School of Theology, and a Fellow withthe James M Houston Centre for Humanity & the Common Good at Regent College. Previously, he was the Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics and McDonald Scholar in the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics (directed by DrLydia Dugdale) at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons in NYC. At Columbia Dr. Moyse was the intellectual curator and director of the Columbia Character Cooperatives (medical students) and the co-director with Dr Beatriz Desanti de Oliveira of the Character and Clinical Ethics Pathway (internal medicine residents), which were both novel educational programming in ethics education and professional/ moral formation. He also had the privilege of serve as the McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow in Christian Ethics and Public Life with the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life at the University of Oxford, where he was also a senior member of Christ Church College. Dr. Moyse was alsoappointed a humanities and healthcare fellow with a Wellcome Trust ISSF funded project, 'Advancing medical professionalism: integrating humanities teaching inthe University of Oxford's medical school'. In addition to these recent roles, his academic background includes training in theology, bioethics and health policy, and applied physiology.