One must technologize bodies to conceive of organ transplantation. Organs must be envisioned as replaceable parts, serving mechanical functions for the workings of the body. In this way, it becomes possible to imagine exchanging someone’s organs without changing anything essential about the selfhood of the person. But to envision organs as mechanical parts is phenomenologically uncomfortable; thus, the terminology used to describe the practice of organ retrieval seems to attempt other, less technological ways of viewing the human body. In this (...) paper, I analyze three common metaphors that currently contextualize the process of organ retrieval in English-speaking communities: harvesting the agrarian body, procuring the commodified body, and receiving the gifted body. These powerful images constrain the gaze toward the body in important ways. Every gaze both obscures and reveals. While each of these three metaphors makes sense of some aspects of organ retrieval, each of them is ultimately subject to being overtaken by what Jeffrey Bishop calls the technological imaginary. This imaginary deploys a gaze that obscures important elements of what it means to be human and does violence to parts of the phenomenological experience of transplantation and bodily existence. I argue that no matter how hard one tries to avoid the technological aspect of transplantation practices by embracing nonviolent metaphors—even the metaphor of gifting, which seems the most promising—it will never be possible to fully resist organ transplantation’s violence toward our phenomenological sense of embodiment. (shrink)

It is commonly held that Christian ethics generally and Christian bioethics particularly is the application of Christian moral systems to novel problems engaged by contemporary culture and created by contemporary technology. On this view, Christianity adds its moral vision to a technology, baptizing it for use. In this essay, I show that modern technology is a metaphysical moral worldview that enacts its own moral vision, shaping a moral imaginary, shaping our moral perception, creating moral subjects, and shaping what we imagine (...) as moral intentions. In fact, modern technics has its own liturgics, which is foreign to Christian Divine Liturgy. Divine Liturgy is world forming, showing us a different world than the one that comes into relief in the ersatz liturgy of modern medical technics. (shrink)