On the Christian in Christian bioethics.

What is Christian about Christian bioethics? And is an authentically Christian bioethics a practical possibility in the world in which we find ourselves? In my essay I argue that personhood and the personal are so fundamental to the Christian understanding of our humanity that body, soul, and spirit are probably best understood as the components of a triune (as opposed to dual) aspect theory of personhood. To confess to a Christian bioethics is to admit that Christians cannot pretend fully to understand either cures or their meaning. However effective and "knowledge-based" contemporary medical interventions are, a Christian must humbly and honestly confess a lack of complete knowledge on both levels. At the same time, a Christian bioethicist must express a total personal commitment to Christian Faith.     

Christian bioethics, secular bioethics, and the claim to cultural authority.

Though the papers in this volume for the most part address the question, "What is Christian about Christian Bioethics", this paper addresses instead a closely related question, "How would a Christian approach to bioethics differ from the kind of secular academic bioethics that has emerged as such an important field in the contemporary university?" While it is generally assumed that a secular bioethics rooted in moral philosophy will be more culturally authoritative than an approach to bioethics grounded in the contingent particularities of a religious tradition, I will give reasons for rejecting this assumption. By examining the history of the recent revival of academic bioethics as well as the state of the contemporary moral philosophy on which it is based I will suggest that secular bioethics suffers from many of the same liabilities as a carefully articulated Christian bioethics. At the end of the paper I will turn briefly to examine the question of how, in light of this discussion, a Christian bioethics might best be pursued.     

Towards a Christian bioethics.

Rather than revealing itself as a single, unified, ecumenical faith, Christianity is sundered with Christians united neither in one communion nor in one baptism. Christian Bioethics seeks to examine the traditional content-full moral commitments which the Christian faiths bring to life, sexuality, suffering, illness and death within the contexts of medicine and health care. Seeking to understand the differences which separate the bioethics of Roman Catholics, Protestants, and the Orthodox, Christian Bioethics explores the manners in which the faiths diverge. The failure of the Enlightenment project to disclose a content-full communality that would bind mankind has left much to be reconsidered by Christians who face new ethical dilemmas in the novel guise of advances in health care technologies.     

Christian bioethics as non-ecumenical.

A community's morality depends on the moral premises, rules of evidence, and rules of inference it acknowledges, as well as on the social structure of those in authority to rule knowledge claims in or out of a community's set of commitments. For Christians, who is an authority and who is in authority are determined by Holy Tradition, through which in the Mysteries one experiences the Holy Spirit. Because of the requirement of repentance and conversion to the message of Christ preserved in the Tradition, the authority of the community must not only exclude heretical teaching but heretical communities from communion. Understanding Christian bioethics requires a focus on the content of that bioethics in terms of its social context within a right-believing, right-worshipping community. Christian bioethics should be non-ecumenical by recognizing that true moral knowledge has particular moral content, is communal, and is not fully available outside of the community of right worship. The difficulty with Roman Catholicism's understandings of bioethics lies not just in its continued inordinate accent on the role of reason apart from repentance (as well as in its defining novel doctrines), but in Roman Catholicism's not recognizing that the contemporary, post-Christian age is in good measure the consequence of its post-Vatican II failure to call for a return to the traditional pieties and asceticisms of the Fathers so that all might know rightly concerning the requirements of Christian bioethics.     

Christian bioethics and the Church's political worship.

Christian bioethics springs from the worship that is the response of the Church to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Such worship is distinctively political in nature, in that it acknowledges Christ as Lord. Because it is a political worship, it can recognize no other lords and no other prior claims on its allegiance: these include the claims of an allegedly universal ethics and politics determined from outside the Church. However the Church is called not just to be a contrast society, but also to witness to the freeing of the world from salvific pretensions in order that it may embrace its proper temporality. The implications of this for the distinctiveness of Christian bioethics are brought out in three movements: first, the Church's itself learning how it is to conceive bioethics; second, the Church's role in unmasking the idols of secular bioethics; and third, the Church's witnessing to the freeing of medicine from idolatrous aspirations.     

From the numinous to the sacred

Abstract :  Jung took the idea of the 'numinous' from Rudolf Otto's book Das Heilige (E.T. The Idea of the Holy ) and made it central to his understanding of religion. However, as Lucy Huskinson has recently pointed out, this involves a misreading of Otto's work in which we have to look beyond the numinous (which is the non-rational factor in religion) towards the 'holy' which, like a symbol, holds the rational and non-rational aspects of religious experience together in a personally transformative way. This understanding of the spiritual and psychological journey is supported by case material in which a numinous experience, arising in the context of intensive analytical psychotherapy, proved to be but the first step in a process which led, through a period of mourning, towards the development of the patient's capacity to symbolize. In the light of this, the author suggests that the sacred is to be found in the capacity for a certain quality of symbolic relatedness—to self and other—which may or may not be attended by numinous experience.     

Second-personal reasons: why we need something like them,but why there are actually no such things

Abstract

Stephen Darwall, in his book The Second-Person Standpoint (2006), has argued for an account of morality grounded in what he calls second-personal reasons. My first aim in this paper is to demonstrate the value of an account like Darwall’s; as I read it, it responds to the need for an account of morality as ‘intrinsic’ to the person. However, I go on to argue, as my second aim in this paper, that Darwall’s account is ultimately unsuccessful. I hope to achieve these aims by contrasting Darwall’s second-personal account with two other accounts, Hobbes’ and the neo-Kantians’. In the first case, I aim to show that Darwall’s account meets a need that the other accounts don’t in virtue of its differences from the other accounts; and in the second case, I aim to show that Darwall’s account ultimately fails in virtue of its residual similarities to at least one of them.     

Sin and bioethics: why a liturgical anthropology is foundational.

The project of articulating a coherent, canonical, content-full, secular morality-cum-bioethics fails, because it does not acknowledge sin, which is to say, it does not acknowledge the centrality of holiness, which is essential to a non-distorted understanding of human existence and of morality. Secular morality cannot establish a particular moral content, the harmony of the good and the right, or the necessary precedence of morality over prudence, because such is possible only in terms of an ultimate point of reference: God. The necessity of a rightly ordered appreciation of God places centrally the focus on holiness and the avoidance of sin. Because the cardinal relationship of creatures to their Creator is worship, and because the cardinal corporate act of human worship is the Liturgy, morality in general and bioethics in particular can be understood in terms of the conditions necessary, so as worthily to enter into Eucharistic liturgical participation. Morality can be summed up in terms of the requirements of ritual purity. A liturgical anthropology is foundational to an account of the content-full morality and bioethics that should bind humans, since humans are first and foremost creatures obliged to join in rightly ordered worship of their Creator. When humans worship correctly, when they avoid sin and pursue holiness, they participate in restoring created reality.     

The ecumenical and non-ecumenical dialectic of Christian bioethics.

Non-ecumenical Christian bioethics will seem a strange category for many. The category relies on the recognition that bioethics mediates morality and ethics in healthcare. As such bioethics will have particular content. It is the content of a moral vision that both divides and unites. The enterprise of non-ecumenical Christian bioethics explores how Christians are both divided and united on the issue of bioethics. Non-ecumenical Christian bioethics is opposed to a facile ecumenism that reduces the content of Christian morality to the lowest common denominator.     

Spirituality in nursing theory and practice: dilemmas for Christian bioethics.

Moral strangerhood is due in part to competing worldviews. The profession of nursing is experiencing a paradigm shift which creates ethical dilemmas for both Christian nurses and Christian patients. Nursing's new focus on spirituality and spiritual care presents itself as broadly defining a desired state or patient outcome -- spiritual integrity -- supposed to be applicable to all patients of all faiths. Analysis of nursing's definition of spirituality reveals assumptions and values consistent with an Eastern/New Age worldview which may cause hostility towards Christian patients stereotyped as dogmatic or noncompliant.     

The sacred and the profane: social media and temporal patterns of religiosity in the United Arab Emirates

ABSTRACT

Large datasets associated with internet search engines and social media platforms are increasingly used to study psychological variables. Over the past decade, ‘big data’, as they have become known, have become central to the exploration of a diverse range of topics. Few studies, however, have examined religiosity (religious belief, commitment, and devotion), particularly Islamic religiosity in the Arab world. This study looked at religiosity in the United Arab Emirates through data extracted from Twitter, a popular social media platform. The data comprised 152 million Twitter messages, spanning the period 1 April–30 September 2016. Bilingual search algorithms were employed to investigate the temporal patterns of religiosity expressed within the dataset. The study also explored patterns in the expression of obscenity (offensive language), hypothesising a negative relationship with religious sentiment. Religiosity followed hypothesised temporal patterns and was also inversely correlated with obscenity. There were differences observed between languages (Arabic vs English) and gender, with males, surprisingly, expressing greater religiosity than females. This research contributes to the nascent study of religiosity through social media.