Stages on Life's Way


Book Description

A leading Orthodox Christian ethicist and a licensed psychotherapist provide practical, theological, and pastoral thinking on complex matters: stem cell research, gene therapy, definitions of sexuality and marriage, treatment of addictive behaviors, and end-of-life care.




The Foundations of Bioethics


Book Description

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.




The Sacred Gift of Life


Book Description

This work provides an evaluation of bioethical issues from the perspective of Scripture and Orthodox tradition. Beginning with a discussion of present-day bioethical dilemmas, it provides an overview of major theological themes that condition any Orthodox response to issues involving creation and termination of human life. The following chapters then take up questions concerning the meaning of sexuality and the morality of various forms of sexual behaviour; the question when does human life being?; a moral assessment, from an Orthodox perspective, of procedures such as abortion, in vitro fertilization and genetic engineering (including human cloning); and end of life issues, including the meaning of suffering, euthanasia, physician assisted suicide, and care for the terminally ill.




Orthodox Christian Bioethics


Book Description

This book advocates a substantive common ground in global bioethics. It starts from an Orthodox Christian anthropology to highlight the relationship between hospitality, dignity, and vulnerability as the meeting point between strangers, regardless of their value system. The universal experience of suffering and death is the unifying starting point of that anthropology. Therefore, in medicine, where physicians and patients meet as utter strangers, not only as moral strangers, hospitality highlights the human dignity and vulnerability of both parties and establishes gratitude, compassion, and solidarity as the constructive building blocks of a healing practice of medicine and a humane medical system, locally and globally.




Bioethics and the Christian Life


Book Description

Just about everyone will face a difficult bioethics decision at some point. In this book a theologian, ethicist, and lawyer equips Christians to make such decisions based on biblical truth, wisdom, and virtue. Though a relatively new discipline, bioethics has generated extraordinary interest due to a number of socially pressing issues. Bioethics and the Christian Life places bioethics within the holistic context of the Christian life, both developing a general Christian approach to making bioethics decisions and addressing a number of specific, controversial areas of bioethics. Clear, concise, and well-organized, the book is divided into three sections. The first lays the theological foundation for bioethics decision-making and discusses the importance of wisdom and virtue in working through these issues. The second section addresses beginning-of-life issues, such as abortion, stem-cell research, and infertility treatments. The third section covers end-of-life issues, such as living wills, accepting and refusing medical treatment, and treatment of patients in permanent vegetative states.




Religious Perspectives on Bioethics


Book Description

First published in 2004. Religious Perspectives in Bioethics surveys recent bioethics discussion in thirteen religious traditions. Christian contributions include chapters on Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, the Episcopal, German Protestant, and Baptist traditions, Reformed Christianity, and the Latter Day Saints. The volume also includes chapters on Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Daoism.




Christian Ethics: A Very Short Introduction


Book Description

This book provides both a short history of Christian ethics and looks at itsbasic sources as they arise from Judaism, Greco-Roman ethics, andChristianity




After God


Book Description

Engelhardt invites readers to understand what it means to live in a world after God, where questions of sin and virtue have been replaced with life-and-death-style choices. After God provides a dark prophetic vision. But there is still hope. As Engelhardt argues, In this culture, children now grow up apart from and defended against a recognition of the God Who lives. They are nurtured in a social fabric that is structured so as to avoid a recognition of, much less an encounter with, God. Nevertheless ... a traditional Christianity has endured, even though its morality and bioethics have become ever more strongly counter-cultural. The source of this traditional Christian otherness over against the surrounding post-theistic culture lies in the origins of Christianity itself, in the Christianity of the Apostles and the Fathers, namely, in Orthodox Christianity. Against the tenor of the times, disregarding the animus to set traditional Christianity aside, and despite heretics prominent within its fold, Orthodox Christianity remains a light in a world after God. --! From back cover.




Healing Humanity


Book Description

Western societies today are coming unmoored in the face of an earth-shaking ethical and cultural paradigm shift. At its core is the question of what it means to be human and how we are meant to live. The old answers are no longer accepted; a dizzying array of options are offered in their stead. Underpinning this smorgasbord of lifestyles is a thicket of unquestioned assumptions, such as the separation of gender from biological sex, which not so long ago would have been universally rejected as radical notions. In the spring of 2019, a group of Orthodox Christian scholars drawn from a wide variety of academic disciplines met together to offer responses to the moral crisis our generation faces, elaborating upon its various forms and facilitating a fuller understanding of some of its theological and philosophical foundations. In doing so they offer support to all those who question the claims that are so forcefully insisted upon today &– a clarity that will aid them in standing up and resisting trends that have already shown to be the cause of great suffering and unhappiness. Among the contributors to this volume are NY Times bestselling author Rod Dreher, Frederica Matthewes-Green, Dr David Bradshaw, Fr Chad Hatfield, and Fr Peter Heers. Collectively, these scholars remind us that it is only through our participation in the life of Christ, God who became man, that we can find the healing of our humanity through the restoration in us of His image, in which we were formed at the beginning of time.




The Foundations of Christian Bioethics


Book Description

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.