Incorvaia Publishes Article on Protestantism, Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking

Posted June 3, 2022

Aubrey DeVeny Incorvaia, a recent Ph.D. graduate of the School of Public Policy, published an article in Palliative Care and Social Practice. The piece, titled “Biathanatos Revisited: Anabaptist Perspectives on Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking in the Face of Terminal Illness,” is the second published article based off of her thesis focused on the positive death movement, which she successfully defended in Spring 2022.

In the article, Incorvaia discusses how voluntarily stopping eating and drinking — in this case, used to hasten death in the face of terminal illness — might be received by Christian Protestants. She posits that the group would be open to the practice because of their more liberal political leanings and potential Christian-based justifications for the practice.

Incorvaia tests this theory with a case study of one Anabaptist congregation and finds that the participants were in favor of voluntarily stopping eating and drinking, though they differed in their responses to faith-based justifications for it.

“The church’s doctrinal context did not forbid the behavior; the community focused on nonjudgment and acceptance of their (imagined) intimate peer; and the legality of the choice was clear, up to a point,” Incorvaia writes. “Future researchers should consider executing comparative case studies to test this framework and advance its elaboration.”

Read the full article at https://doi.org/10.1177/26323524221101074.