I argue here that the ways we experience, think about, and treat pain are bound up with sociocultural and technological phenomena that shape our desires and expectations. I propose a way of imagining caring for and offering healing to those who suffer pain informed by the Christian theological tradition. This way does not aspire to replace the care and healing made possible by modern medicine, but rather to place it within the common life of a community of mutual love, hospitality, (...) and reciprocal care. (shrink)

In The Body of Compassion, Joel Shuman presents an important, new theological treatment of contemporary bioethics, weaving together personal experience, a critical treatise on contemporary bioethics, and an exploration of a Christian theological alternative.The author first draws the reader into a consideration of the current state of bioethics by relating the story of his grandfather, a hard-working family man 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 teleological concern for the body”—i.e., to trying to understand 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 places where science and religion intersect and seem to conflict. (shrink)

I argue here that Weberian disenchantment is manifest in the triumph of instrumental reason and the expansion of analytic enquiry, which now dominates not simply those sciences upon which medicine depends, but medical practice itself. I suggest ways that analytic enquiry, also referred to here as anatomical reasoning, are part of a particular ideology—a way of seeing, speaking about, and inhabiting the world—that often fails to serve the health of patients because it is incapable of “seeing” them in the moral (...) sense described by Iris Murdoch and others. I use the work of James Elkins and Wendell Berry to call for the recovery of a way of seeing the human body as both other and more than an object of scientific enquiry and social control. (shrink)

The attempt to arrive at some consensus on precisely what qualifies a human as a person represents one of the more persistently debated and widely significant issues in modern biomedical ethics. The attribution of personhood has been and continues to be a powerful tool in moral discourse. Biomedical and bioethical debates about personhood seem especially morally significant in late modernity given the recent trends in biomedical technology. Our attempts to formally articulate universally agreed upon criteria for personhood represent some of (...) the last vestiges of the hope that we can achieve substantial moral agreement in an otherwise morally fragmented world. In this essay, we argue that, from the perspective of certain strands of the Christian tradition, all bioethics grounded in attempts to develop formal, objective criteria by which we may designate a given individual a person are misguided. Criteria centering on the possession of reflective mental capacity, moreover, are for Christians especially problematic. We suggest that there are no morally neutral ways of designating personhood. (shrink)

The question of what, if anything, Christian theology as theology might contribute to ethical debates about appropriate uses of medical genetics has often been ignored. The answer is complex, and the author argues it is best characterized by an explanation of the analogous aspirations of the two: both have as their goal the perfection of the human being, both assert that the present disposition of the human body is on a fundamental level more often than not other than it ought (...) to be, and both aspire to transform the present state of the body toward a future state in which present imperfections no longer exist. Given these analogous concerns, it would seem that one of the primary moral contributions that Christianity can make to debates about medical genetics is to ask whether and to what extent the Christian vision of embodied human perfection is compatible with the vision of perfection offered by the sciences pertaining to medical genetics. The author pursues a discussion of this analogy and its implications in this essay. (shrink)

This paper compares the accounts of agency, morality, and law presumed by liberal political theory to the account offered by Thomas Aquinas. In Aquinas, law is among the several "principles of human acts" and is presumed always to have a constructive effect on the moral formation of those living under its aegis. One of its purposes, in other words, is to make women and men good. The liberal account, on the other hand, is relatively less attentive to the constructive effects (...) of law. This difference raises a question concerning the viability of the liberal assumption of a distinction between a morally neutral public law and a private morality. (shrink)