Members of the Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs Standing Committee of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities present a collection of insights and recommendations developed from their collective experience, intended for those engaged in the work of healthcare ethics consultation.

The ASBH Core Competencies Update Task Force (Tarzian and ASBH Core Competencies Update Task Force 2013) provides useful information for individual consultants performing case consultations. A grow...

Research involving recently deceased humans that are physiologically maintained following declaration of death by neurologic criteria—or ‘research involving the recently deceased’—can fill a translational research gap while reducing harm to animals and living human subjects. It also creates new challenges for honouring the donor’s legacy, respecting the rights of donor loved ones, resource allocation and public health. As this research model gains traction, new empirical ethics questions must be answered to preserve public trust in all forms of tissue donation and (...) in the practice of medicine while respecting the legacy of the deceased and the rights of donor loved ones. This article suggests several topics for immediate investigation to understand the attitudes and experiences of researchers, clinical collaborators, donor loved ones and the public to ensure research involving the recently deceased advances ethically. (shrink)

The essays in this special issue of HEC Forum provide reflections that make explicit the implicit anthropology that our current pandemic has brought but which in the medical ethics literature around COVID-19 has to a great extent ignored. Three of the essays are clearly “journalistic” as a literary genre: one by a hospital chaplain, one by a medical student in her pre-clinical years, and one by a fourth-year medical student who reports her experience as she completed her undergraduate clerkships and (...) applied for positions in graduate medical education. Other essays explore the pandemic from historical, sociological, and economic perspectives, particularly how triage policies have been found to be largely blind to structural healthcare disparities, while simultaneously unable to appropriately address those disparities. Central issues that need to be addressed in triage are not just whether a utilitarian response is the most just response, but what exactly is the greatest good for the greatest number? Together, the essays in this special issue of HEC Forum create a call for a more anthropological approach to understanding health and healthcare. The narrow approach of viewing health as resulting primarily from healthcare will continue to hinder advances and perpetuate disparities. Health outcomes result from a complex interaction of various social, economic, cultural, historical, and political factors. Advancing healthcare requires contextualizing the health of populations amongst these factors. The COVID-19 pandemic has made us keenly aware of how interdependent our health as a society can be. (shrink)

Biblical scholars have generally prided themselves on their independence from systematic theology. Yet their greatest achievements have been accomplished in those periods when constructive theology was strong and virile.

It is simply not the case that the more historical and literary knowledge acquired, the better one is able to understand the biblical text. The issue turns on the use of proper discernment.

“The challenge of the Christian interpreter in our day is to hear the full range of notes within all of Scripture, to wrestle with the theological implication of this biblical witness, and, above all, to come to grips with the agony of our age before a living God who still speaks through the Prophets and Apostles.”.

A major literary and theological force was at work in shaping the present form of the Hebrew Bible by which prophetic oracles directed to one generation were fashioned in Sacred Scripture by a canonical process to be used by another generation.

In this paper the author argues that a narrative approach to understanding assisted suicide has been compromised by the notion that all narratives must be both coherent and unified. He asks what we are to do with those narratives that cannot seem to cohere or be other than full of disunity? Is suicide the only way to make meaning out of suffering? He then proposes that the narrative found in the Gospel of Mark leads Christians to a life in hope (...) and compassion in spite of apparent incoherence and disunity and threats of abandonment and suffering. (shrink)