Christian Bioethics

ISSNs: 1380-3603, 1744-4195

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  1.  6
    Medical Risk, Patient Hope, and Hospital Chaplaincy: Cautionary Tales.Mark J. Cherry - 2024 - Christian Bioethics 30 (3):145-153.
    Secular bioethics fails to grasp the central moral and spiritual realities of medicine. As the authors in this issue of Christian Bioethics argue, contemporary healthcare practice is often based on the false premise that medical science can secure the safety of human life. Yet, the standard “biopsychosocial model” of medicine fails to grasp the theological dimensions of healthcare often harming patients and their families in the process. Indeed, as the articles explore, all too often secular bioethics manipulates medicine to achieve (...)
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  2.  7
    Uncertainty, Risk, and the Need for Trust in Our Hope for Health.Bob Cutillo - 2024 - Christian Bioethics 30 (3):154-163.
    Science and medicine have had great success in reducing the uncertainties surrounding sickness over the last 100 years. But current efforts to reduce the risk of future disease in healthy people depend on abstract and disembodied statistical models that are increasingly distant from individual lives with little or no likelihood of personal benefit. When couched in numerical terms and combined with the fear of an unknown future, we are easily manipulated by the authority of fact. A new form of authority (...)
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  3.  5
    Inhumation as Theophanic Encounter: The Eastern Orthodox Rejection of Cremation.Alexander Earl - 2024 - Christian Bioethics 30 (3):200-212.
    This essay aims to articulate why the Orthodox have historically, and to the present, opposed cremation. Its primary line of argument is that inhumation is a site of “theophanic encounter”: a manifestation of the Glory of God. This theophanic quality is borne out in the scriptures and the Church’s liturgical experience. In particular, the connections between the funeral service and the entombed Christ on Holy Friday and Saturday properly situate the meaning of the post-mortem body. This intimate connection between the (...)
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  4.  4
    On the Morality of Reallocating Life-Sustaining Interventions in Times of Scarcity.Martin G. Leever - 2024 - Christian Bioethics 30 (3):176-188.
    As coronavirus disease 2019 made its way across the world in 2019, health systems began to develop guidelines to allocate what was expected to be a scarcity of medical resources. Considerable attention was given to triaging intensive care resources such as ventilators. While there was general agreement among bioethicists and policymakers that it may be permissible to withhold life-sustaining interventions from patients with poor prognoses in order to make them available to patients with better prognoses, there was disagreement about the (...)
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  5.  9
    Ethical Accompaniment and End-of-Life Care.Joshua R. Snyder - 2024 - Christian Bioethics 30 (3):189-199.
    A theology of accompaniment offers insights on how to journey with and be present to those who suffer from terminal illness. In order to sustain acts of accompaniment, the companion must cultivate specific virtues through prayer and the practices of the Christian community. This ethic of accompaniment is based on a Thomistic conceptualization of the virtues of charity and fortitude. These virtues enable the companion to engage in four types of practices with and on behalf of the dying patient. Ethical (...)
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  6.  10
    A Theological Framework for Understanding Hope in the Clinic.Andrea Thornton - 2024 - Christian Bioethics 30 (3):164-175.
    Appeals to the miraculous are common in healthcare, and arguments about end-of-life decision-making can quickly become theological. Assessments of hope have been recommended within the biopsychosocialspiritual model of medicine, but these assessments fail to account for the theological dimension of hope. Examples of failed assessments include recent efforts in palliative care and classic works, such as On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. To adequately address the patient’s and family members’ hopes without patronizing or harming the patient, assessments must be (...)
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  7.  31
    Ectogestation and Humanity’s Whence? An Exploration with Saint Augustine and Karl Barth.Matthew Lee Anderson - 2024 - Christian Bioethics 30 (2):106-119.
    This essay explores the theological and anthropological significance of birth, in order to discern what might be lost with the adoption of complete ectogestation (“artificial wombs”). Specifically, it considers both Saint Augustine and Karl Barth’s respective accounts of humanity’s whence—that is, their theological answer to the question of the nature and significance of our origins as individuals. I suggest that Augustine’s account of his origins emphasizes both his epistemic and biological dependency on his mother and nurses, while Barth’s stresses the (...)
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  8.  19
    Ectopic Pregnancy as Previable Delivery.Cara Buskmiller - 2024 - Christian Bioethics 30 (2):120-133.
    Inside and outside of a Christian worldview, bioethicists have discussed ectopic pregnancy at some length as a maternal-fetal vital conflict. Most bioethicists agree that methotrexate and salpingostomy are low-risk, successful interventions for this life-threatening pathology, and are thus beneficent, just, and wholly acceptable. A small cohort of Christian, largely Catholic, bioethicists have reservations about methotrexate and salpingostomy, but cannot resolve their internal disputes about these because of flawed casuistry. This paper aims to settle the issue about whether methotrexate and salpingostomy (...)
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  9. Deadly Language Games: Theological Reflections on Emerging Reproductive Technologies.Nicholas Colgrove - 2024 - Christian Bioethics 30 (2):67-84.
    This issue of Christian Bioethics explores theological, metaphysical, and ethical questions surrounding emerging reproductive technologies. Narratives concerning such technologies are often manipulated via “language games.” Language games involve toying with language to ensure that one’s vision of the good gains or retains political prominence. Such games are common in academic discussions of “artificial womb” technologies. Abortion proponents, for example, are already using language to dehumanize subjects within “artificial wombs.” This is unsurprising. Were relevant subjects considered persons, then abortion access (and (...)
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  10.  24
    Artificial Wombs: Could They Deliver an Answer to the Problem of Frozen Embryos?Christopher Gross - 2024 - Christian Bioethics 30 (2):96-105.
    Catholic thinkers generally agree that artificial womb technology (AWT) would be permissible in cases of partial ectogenesis to assist severely premature infants, but there is substantially more debate concerning whether AWT could be used to save frozen embryos, which are the result of in vitro fertilization (IVF). In many cases, these embryos have been abandoned and left in a permanently cryogenic state, which is an affront to their human dignity. While AWT would allow people to adopt these embryos and give (...)
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  11.  58
    Abortion Pills: Killing or Letting Die?David Hershenov - 2024 - Christian Bioethics 30 (2):134-144.
    Christian pro-lifers often respond to Thomson’s defense of abortion that the violinist is allowed to die while the embryo is killed. Boonin and McMahan counter that this distinction does not provide an objection to extraction abortions that disconnect embryos and allow them to die. I disagree. I first argue that letting die and killing are not to be distinguished by differences between acts and omissions, moral and immoral motives, intentional or unintentional deaths, and causing or not causing a pathology. I (...)
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  12. Detached from Humanity: Artificial Gestation and the Christian Dilemma.Daniel Rodger & Bruce P. Blackshaw - 2024 - Christian Bioethics 30 (2):85-95.
    The development of artificial womb technology is proceeding rapidly and will present important ethical and theological challenges for Christians. While there has been extensive secular discourse on artificial wombs in recent years, there has been little Christian engagement with this topic. There are broadly two primary uses of artificial womb technology—ectogestation as a form of enhanced neonatal care, where some of the gestation period takes place in an artificial womb, and ectogenesis, where the entire gestation period is within an artificial (...)
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  13.  4
    To Whom is the Chaplain Beholden? Guest Editor Introduction to Special Issue.Jordan Mason - 2024 - Christian Bioethics 30 (1):1-5.
    In this issue of Christian Bioethics, we invite chaplains and theologians to examine the role of the hospital chaplain in the contemporary institutional setting of the hospital. The simplicity of the chaplain’s role is often taken for granted; yet, this role is actually multivalent, with duties and loyalties pulling from many different sides. Chaplains are people of faith, ordained and/or endorsed ministers, and pastoral care professionals; they are at once beholden to God, to their own faith expression, and to their (...)
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