This timely and up to date new edition of Biomedicine and Beatitude features an entirely new chapter on the ethics of bodily modification. It is also updated throughout to reflect the pontificate of Pope Francis, recent concerns including ethical issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic, and feedback from the many instructors who used the first edition in the classroom.

Besides ethical questions raised at the beginning and the end of life, Nicanor Austriaco, O.P., discusses the ethics of the clinical encounter, human procreation, organ donation and transplantation, and biomedical research.

Can the Hippocratic and Judeo-Christian traditions be synthesized with contemporary thought about practical reason, virtue and community to provide real-life answers to the dilemmas of healthcare today? Bishop Anthony Fisher discusses conscience, relationships and law in relation to the modern-day controversies surrounding stem cell research, abortion, transplants, artificial feeding and euthanasia, using case studies to offer insight and illumination. What emerges is a reason-based bioethics for the twenty-first century; a bioethics that treats faith and reason with equal seriousness, that shows the relevance of ancient wisdom to the complexities of modern healthcare scenarios and that offers new suggestions for social policy and regulation. Philosophical argument is complemented by Catholic theology and analysis of social and biomedical trends, to make this an auspicious example of a new generation of Catholic bioethical writing which has relevance for people of all faiths and none.

When we think of happiness, we have to admit that our idea is at times worldly and self-centered. Jesus in His Sermon on the Mount showed us that true happiness will elude us, however, if we follow that kind of thinking. And, in the form of a series of promises and challenges, which we have come to know as the Beatitudes, He told us how to find perfect happiness--both here and in the hereafter. In a world that is capable of the best and the worst, we all have reason to be concerned about the very possibility of ever finding happiness in our lifetimes. The good news of the Gospel message is that we can. Even more, it teaches a way based not on rules and obligations so much as one founded on love, a way that depends upon and leads to the blessings of God Himself. These pages have been written in the conviction that every seeker should make the Sermon on the Mount the primary source of what will and will not make her happy. In His approach to the question, Jesus insists from the outset that we face up to the inevitable trials of life: poverty, tears, hunger and thirst, and shows us how we can find God--the source and object of our joy--in the midst of them.

Spiritual sickness troubles American medicine. Through a death-denying culture, medicine has gained enormous power-an influence it maintains by distancing itself from religion, which too often reminds us of our mortality. As a result of this separation of medicine and religion, patients facing serious illness infrequently receive adequate spiritual care, despite the large body of empirical data demonstrating its importance to patient decision-making, quality of life, and medical utilization. This secular-sacred divide also unleashes depersonalizing, social forces through the market, technology, and legal-bureaucratic powers that reduce clinicians to tiny cogs in an unstoppable machine. Hostility to Hospitality is one of the first books of its kind to explore these hostilities threatening medicine and offer a path forward for the partnership of modern medicine and spirituality. Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship including empirical studies, interviews, history and sociology, theology, and public policy, the authors argue for structural pluralism as the key to changing hostility to hospitality.

This is the 1929 English translation of the original German text first published in 1924 and authored by one of the world’s most distinguished Christian philosophers, Dr. Karl Adam. This book is a brilliant and evocative study of the fundamental concepts of the Catholic Faith, from its tenets, its historical development and the role of the Church in world society. For many on the outside, Catholicism, according to Dr. Adam, represents a daunting and somewhat foreign confused mass of conflicting forces that has somehow survived the tests of time. Catholicism is simultaneously new yet quite old; holy yet corrupt; hierarchical yet personal; dogmatic yet utilitarian, and so on. How can someone outside the Church get a good grasp on the essence of Catholicism when it is so vast and seemingly complex? Those attempting to grasp the very heart and spirit of Catholicism should read Karl Adam’s book, which is a most elegant and concise exploration of the faith and an attempt to address these ambiguities. What are the fundamental attributes of the Catholic Church? What is the source from which it has drawn vigor and life through its two thousand years of life on earth? What are the secret sources of its incredible vitality in the world today? The author answers these and many other questions about the nature and structure of the Church. He examines the essential nature of the Catholic Church from the basic premise that it was expressly founded by Christ, traces its historical development and analyzes its actual functioning through the ages.