Christianity And Modern Medicine Foundations For Bioethics

Raises and considers issues common to medical professionals in order to cut through the moral fog in medical science Christianity and Modern Medicine raises moral questions that were merely hypothetical just decades ago. Moreover, traditional moral models are being challenged incessantly by the medical community at large, shifting the conversation to patient and societal rights within a framework of moral relativism and rendering the decision-making process morally vague and confusing. In Christianity and Modern Medicine, bioethicist Mark Wesley Foreman and attorney Lindsay C. Leonard delve into the major ethical issues facing today's medical professionals with the purpose of providing principles and guidelines for making critical ethical decisions where medical knowledge, technologies, and capabilities are constantly evolving. Topics covered include: • procreational ethics • abortion • infanticide • euthanasia • physician-assisted suicide • genetic ethics • medical research • clinical ethics • legal issues • and more While Christianity and Modern Medicine is designed especially for students planning careers in the medical field, it is accessible to any Christian interested in steering more clearly through the moral fog in the practice of medicine today.

For decades, Engelhardt has alluded to the ethics that binds moral friends. While his 'Foundations of Bioethics' explored the sparse ethics binding moral strangers, this long-awaited volume addresses the morality at the foundations of Christian bioethics. The volume opens with an analysis of the marginalization of Christian bioethics in the 1970s and the irremedial shortcomings of secular ethics in general. Drawing on the Christianity of the first millennium, Engelhardt provides the ontological and epistemological foundations for a Christian bioethics that can remedy the onesidedness of a secular bioethics and supply the bases for a Christian bioethics. The volume then addresses issues from abortion, third-party-assisted reproduction, and cloning, to withholding and withdrawing treatment, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia. Practices such as free and informed consent are relocated within a traditional Christian morality. Attention is also given to the allocation of scarce resources in health care, and to the challenge of maintaining the Christian identity of physicians, nurses, patients, and health care institutions in a culture that is now post-Christian.

We who live in this post-modern late twentieth century culture are still children of dualism. For a variety of rather complex reasons we continue to split apart and treat as radical opposites body and spirit, medicine and religion, sacred and secular, private and public, love and justice, men and women. Though this is still our strong tendency, we are beginning to discover both the futility and the harm of such dualistic splitting. Peoples of many ancient cultures might smile at the belatedness of our discovery concerning the commonalities of medicine and religion. A cur sory glance back at ancient Egypt, Samaria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome would disclose a common thread - the close union of religion and medicine. Both were centrally concerned with healing, health, and wholeness. The person was understood as a unity of body, mind, and spirit. The priest and the physician frequently were combined in the same individual. One of the important contributions of this significant volume of essays is the sustained attack upon dualism. From a variety of vantage points, virtually all of the authors unmask the varied manifestations of dualism in religion and medicine, urging a more holistic approach. Since the editor has provided an excellent summary of each article, I shall not attempt to comment on specific contributions. Rather , I wish to highlight three 1 broad themes which I find notable for theological ethics.

In 'The Body of Compassion', Joel Shuman presents an important new theological treatment of contemporary bioethics, weaving together personal experience, a critical treatise on bioethics, and an exploration of a Christian theological alternative. The author first draws the reader toward a consideration of the current state of his grandfather, a hardworking man with deep attachments to family and land who died a solitary death, unaccompanied by loved ones, in the unfamiliar and sterile world of a hospital. Troubled by the way his grandfather died, Shuman takes the reader along as he explores how modern medicine has distanced itself from dealing with people as living beings beyond their immediate physicality. He examines how various approaches to bioethics over the past twenty years have tried to remedy this problem by prescribing certain standards for treatment and how each of these ultimately has fallen short due to the lack of a Òteleological concern for the bodyÓ - i.e., a concern for what the body is actually for in a larger context. From this point, Shuman deftly moves to a discussion of the centrality of the body to Christianity, focusing on how baptism, participation in the liturgy, and the partaking of the Eucharist all serve to unite Christians as one in the body of Christ. For Christians, the author argues, the body does not just belong to the individual but rather is one with the community of the Church. With this in mind, Shuman proposes a new kind of bioethics for Christians, where care for the body of Christ becomes the model of how we should care for and receive care from each other. This fresh and thought-provoking book is sure to be of interest to ethicists, medical professionals, and everyone who is troubled by the conflicts between science and religion.

This new, thoroughly recast Second Edition has been acclaimed as "the most important book written since the beginning of that strange project called bioethics" (Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University). Its philosophical exploration of the foundations of secular bioethics has been substantially expanded. The book challenges the values of much of contemporary bioethics and health care policy by confronting their failure to secure the moral norms they seek to apply. The nature of health and disease, the definition of death, the morality of abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, germline genetic engineering, triage decisions and distributive justice in health care are all addressed within an integrated reconsideration of bioethics as a whole. New material has been added regarding social justice, health care reform and environmental ethics. The very possibility and meaning of a secular bioethics are re-explored.

Modern medicine has produced many wonderful technological breakthroughs that have extended the limits of the frail human body. However, much of the focus of this medical research has been on the physical, often reducing the human being to a biological machine to be examined, understood, and controlled. This book begins by asking whether the modern medical milieu has overly objectified the body, unwittingly or not, and whether current studies in bioethics are up to the task of restoring a fuller understanding of the human person. In response, various authors here suggest that a more theological/religious approach would be helpful, or perhaps even necessary. Presenting specific perspectives from Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the book is divided into three parts: "Understanding the Body," "Respecting the Body," and "The Body at the End of Life." A panel of expert contributors—including philosophers, physicians, and theologians and scholars of religion— answer key questions such as: What is the relationship between body and soul? What are our obligations toward human bodies? How should medicine respond to suffering and death? The resulting text is an interdisciplinary treatise on how medicine can best function in our societies. Offering a new way to approach the medical humanities, this book will be of keen interest to any scholars with an interest in contemporary religious perspectives on medicine and the body.

At the Roots of Christian Bioethics explores Professor H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.'s pursuit for the decisive ground of the meaning of human existence and knowledge of appropriate moral choice. Engelhardt has been the most influential, cogent, but critical voice within bioethics of the past several decades. The essays in this volume compass epistemological, methodological and topical contributions to bioethics, political theory, and Christian theology. Each explores Engelhardt's diagnosis of the contemporary social and cultural crisis, seeking to make sense of the decidedly post-Christian and often openly anti-Christian ethics that dominates public morality and politic policy. Each author investigates Engelhardt's personal and tireless enquiry to secure ultimate moral foundations as well as to recognize the full implications of the results of his investigations: that Christian bioethics does not originate in human reason but in the command of God.

"The extensive attention devoted to abortion has led Christians for too long to overlook much of the exploding bioethics agenda. Moreover, to focus only on 'issues' is to fail to address the profound changes taking place in the very nature of the medical profession. This book signals the commitment of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity to help expand the church's bioethical vision and to foster a more substantial Christian contribution to the public debate."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved