As the prototype par excellence of Christian Orthodox ethics, the Divine Liturgy must constitute the prototype for Christian bioethics. According to St. Nicholas Cabasilas, the Divine Liturgy corresponds to the history of the economy of the Saviour and cultivates life in Christ, that is the way of life, the ethics that should characterize the life of a faithful Christian. The import of such an approach is significant for Orthodox Christian bioethics with regard to ethical questions that are connected both with (...) the beginning and the end of human life. In contrast to a way of thinking that, in order to answer the question about the beginning and the end of human life, tries to define moments in time in biological terms, Orthodox Christian ethics reveals man’s desire to himself define the content of the answer, and proposes instead God as the beginning and the end of man. (shrink)

Abortion is an especially salient issue for considering the general problematic of religiously based conversation in the public square. It remains deeply divisive, fully thirty-four years after Roe v. Wade. Such divisiveness cannot be interpreted as merely an expression of profound differences between “secular” and “religious” voices, because differences also emerge among Christian denominations, reflecting different sources of moral authority, different accounts of moral discernment, and different judgments about the appropriate relations between law and morality in the context of pluralism. (...) As this paper explores, however, despite those differences, a generally identifiable “Christian” position concerning the moral status of abortion can be distinguished from secular philosophical judgments on the issue, which is important for Christian engagement with public policy debate. (shrink)