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This page last updated 12 February 2018  

Letters to AO

EVERY WEEK WE PUBLISH a selection of letters we receive in response to something you've read at Anglicans Online. Stop by and have a look at what other AO readers are thinking.

Alas, we cannot publish every letter we receive. And we won't publish letters that are anonymous, hateful, illiterate, or otherwise in our judgment do not benefit the readers of Anglicans Online. We usually do not publish letters written in response to other letters. We edit letters to conform with standard AO house style for punctuation, but we do not change, for example, American spelling to conform to Canadian orthography. On occasion we'll gently edit letters that are too verbose in their original form. Email addresses are included when the authors give permission to do so.

If you'd like to respond to a letter whose author does not list an email, you can send your response to Anglicans Online and we'll forward it to the writer.

Letters from the week of 5 - 11 February 2017

Like all letters to the editor everywhere, these letters express the opinions of the writers and not Anglicans Online. We publish letters that we think will be of interest to our readers, whether we agree with them or not. If you'd like to write a letter of your own, click here.

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Of Bodies and Things

I read with interest your piece about the "Body Worlds" exhibit. A number of years ago this exhibit was put on in Toronto. My wife and I went to see it and had far different reactions. I, as a Hospital Chaplain, found it to be distressing. So much death, suspended in odd scenes depicting many stations of life, overwhelmed me with grief. While what my wife saw at was a brilliant exhibition of the wonders of the human body. Perhaps it is because of my life profession as a chaplain, which is often called to be there in the final hours of life and as a priest who conducts a funeral on behalf of a grieving family, that I was distressed with this exhibit of death caught in suspended animation. I have, as part of my chaplaincy training, observed operations and post-mortems, viewing such with a sense of awe and wonder. Yet, Dr. Gunther Von Hagens plastination of corpses in poses from archery to dance, did not evoke awe and wonder but much grief for these bodies suspended in time, failing to return to the dust from whence their lives were fashioned.

Donald Shields
St. Thomas Brooklin (Whitby)
Whitby, Onario, Canada
5 February 2018

 

We launched our 'Letters to AO' section on 11 May 2003. All published letters are in our archives.

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