What, exactly, does it mean to be human? It is an age-old question, one for which theology, philosophy, science, and medicine have all provided different answers. But though a unified response to the question can no longer be taken for granted, how we answer it frames the wide range of different norms, principles, values, and intuitions that characterize today's bioethical discussions. If we don't know what it means to be human, how can we judge whether biomedical sciences threaten or enhance our humanity? This fundamental question, however, receives little attention in the study of bioethics. In a field consumed with the promises and perils of new medical discoveries, emerging technologies, and unprecedented social change, current conversations about bioethics focus primarily on questions of harm and benefit, patient autonomy, and equality of health care distribution. Prevailing models of medical ethics emphasize human capacity for self-control and self-determination, rarely considering such inescapable dimensions of the human condition as disability, loss, and suffering, community and dignity, all of which make it difficult for us to be truly independent. In Health and Human Flourishing, contributors from a wide range of disciplines mine the intersection of the secular and the religious, the medical and the moral, to unearth the ethical and clinical implications of these facets of human existence. Their aim is a richer bioethics, one that takes into account the roles of vulnerability, dignity, integrity, and relationality in human affliction as well as human thriving. Including an examination of how a theological anthropology—a theological understanding of what it means to be a human being—can help us better understand health care, social policy, and science, this thought-provoking anthology will inspire much-needed conversation among philosophers, theologians, and health care professionals.

Medicine, Ethics, Religion addresses three topics that inevitably will be confronted at some level in every human life. Academic understanding of all three fields provides background for entering the field of medicine. Understanding of Bioethics is part of every contemporary student’s higher education. The discipline is presented as an important background understanding of contemporary culture for students. This textbook is required reading for an entry-level course in bioethics or for an introductory philosophy course with a focus on medicine. It may also help readers to understand their own lives, adding e religious dimension to the practice of medicine. The doctor-patient relationship, an analysis of contemporary culture, the impact of technology on human life and the interfaces between medical practice, bioethics, and religion are core themes of this volume.

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.

What role should religion play in a religiously pluralistic liberal society? Public bioethics unavoidably raises this question in a particularly insistent fashion. As the 20 papers in this collection demonstrate, the issues are complex and multifaceted. The authors address specific and highly contested issues as assisted suicide, stem cell research, cloning, reproductive health, and alternative medicine as well as more general questions such as who legitimately speaks for religion in public bioethics, what religion can add to our understanding of justice, and the value of faith-based contributions to healthcare. Christian (Catholic and Protestant), Jewish, Islamic, and Buddhist viewpoints are represented. The first book to focus on the interface of religion and bioethics, this collection fills a significant void in the literature.

Christian health care professionals in our secular and pluralistic society often face uncertainty about the place religious faith holds in today's medical practice. Through an examination of a virtue-based ethics, this book proposes a theological view of medical ethics that helps the Christian physician reconcile faith, reason, and professional duty. Edmund D. Pellegrino and David C. Thomasma trace the history of virtue in moral thought, and they examine current debate about a virtue ethic's place in contemporary bioethics. Their proposal balances theological ethics, based on the virtues of faith, hope, and charity, with contemporary medical ethics, based on the principles of beneficence, justice, and autonomy. The result is a theory of clinical ethics that centers on the virtue of charity and is manifest in practical moral decisions. Using Christian bioethical principles, the authors address today's divisive issues in medicine. For health care providers and all those involved in the fields of ethics and religion, this volume shows how faith and reason can combine to create the best possible healing relationship between health care professional and patient.

Discover the spiritual community's position on bioethics issues! Bioethics from a Faith Perspective: Ethics in Health Care for the Twenty-First Century offers a meaningful, rational, faith-oriented framework for deciding how to deal with important biomedical health care issues. Organ donation, managed care, the Human Genome Project, and medical technology that keeps people alive beyond their “natural” life span are some of the topics it illuminates through case analysis and resolution. Since almost all textbooks in bioethics omit the religious dimension of life (even though the field was inspired and stimulated by religious scholars at Princeton and Yale), this is an indispensable volume. While most people state their moral positions from the background of their religious traditions, many have not had the opportunity to study the relation between their faith perspectives and the difficult issues that arise in the pursuit of health care. This book shows the relevance, significance, and guidance that a faith perspective can offer for dealing with bioethical issues. This unique and thoughtful book: shows you how to distinguish and describe the relation between technical and ethical aspects of health-related issues provides you with a framework of moral principles, theories, values, and faith viewpoints teaches you the defining characteristics of a moral professional-client relationship related to faith helps you to discern when medical ethics and faith commitments are therapeutic and when they are not gives examples describing a moral problem, a faith perspective, and a justified position on that problem Since bioethics has been an amazing story of growth from the 1950s to the present day and is still expanding, there will be changes. Bioethics from a Faith Perspective stimulates that expansion by including the religious dimension. It is the perfect supplement to the existing literature on the subject.

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