Just about everyone will face a difficult bioethics decision at some point. In this book a theologian, ethicist, and lawyer equips Christians to make such decisions based on biblical truth, wisdom, and virtue. Though a relatively new discipline, bioethics has generated extraordinary interest due to a number of socially pressing issues. Bioethics and the Christian Life places bioethics within the holistic context of the Christian life, both developing a general Christian approach to making bioethics decisions and addressing a number of specific, controversial areas of bioethics. Clear, concise, and well-organized, the book is divided into three sections. The first lays the theological foundation for bioethics decision-making and discusses the importance of wisdom and virtue in working through these issues. The second section addresses beginning-of-life issues, such as abortion, stem-cell research, and infertility treatments. The third section covers end-of-life issues, such as living wills, accepting and refusing medical treatment, and treatment of patients in permanent vegetative states.

This new, thoroughly recast Second Edition has been acclaimed as "the most important book written since the beginning of that strange project called bioethics" (Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University). Its philosophical exploration of the foundations of secular bioethics has been substantially expanded. The book challenges the values of much of contemporary bioethics and health care policy by confronting their failure to secure the moral norms they seek to apply. The nature of health and disease, the definition of death, the morality of abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, germline genetic engineering, triage decisions and distributive justice in health care are all addressed within an integrated reconsideration of bioethics as a whole. New material has been added regarding social justice, health care reform and environmental ethics. The very possibility and meaning of a secular bioethics are re-explored.

This new series of books brings thoughtful, biblically informed perspectives to contemporary issues in bioethics. Whether exploring abortion, assisted suicide, genetic engineering, or other controversial issues in bioethics, these volumes provide principled discussion of the ethical implications of today's medical and scientific breakthroughs. Extremely useful to students, scholars, and general readers alike, these volumes are ideal for classroom use -- in nontheological as well as theological settings.This excellent text offers a broad-based introduction to the field of bioethics. Scott Rae and Paul Cox provide an assessment of various secular approaches to bioethics that are particularly influential today, and develop a framework for a Christian approach meant to assist people in addressing the many pressing issues in the field.Though touching on the numerous debated issues in bioethics, the authors are primarily concerned here to give an account of the central theological notions crucialto an informed Christian perspective on bioethics. Their work makes a stimulating and substantial contribution to a Christian bioethic that can effectively engage the pluralistic culture in which health care is practiced today.

For decades, Engelhardt has alluded to the ethics that binds moral friends. While his 'Foundations of Bioethics' explored the sparse ethics binding moral strangers, this long-awaited volume addresses the morality at the foundations of Christian bioethics. The volume opens with an analysis of the marginalization of Christian bioethics in the 1970s and the irremedial shortcomings of secular ethics in general. Drawing on the Christianity of the first millennium, Engelhardt provides the ontological and epistemological foundations for a Christian bioethics that can remedy the onesidedness of a secular bioethics and supply the bases for a Christian bioethics. The volume then addresses issues from abortion, third-party-assisted reproduction, and cloning, to withholding and withdrawing treatment, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia. Practices such as free and informed consent are relocated within a traditional Christian morality. Attention is also given to the allocation of scarce resources in health care, and to the challenge of maintaining the Christian identity of physicians, nurses, patients, and health care institutions in a culture that is now post-Christian.

A biblically informed guidebook for Christians facing difficult health care decisions, from the making of life (infertility, organ donation, cloning) and taking of life (abortion, euthanasia) to the technologically driven faking of life (genetic engineering, etc.).

Bonnie Steinbock presents the authoritative, state-of-the-art guide to current issues in bioethics, covering 30 topics in original essays by some of the world's leading figures in the field, as well as by some newer 'up-and-comers'. Anyone who wants to know how the central debates in bioethics have developed in recent years, and where the debates are going, will want to consult this book.

Living in an era of highly technical medicine is comforting and sometimes confusing. How should Christians make life and death decisions? How do we move from an ancient text like the Bible to twenty-first-century questions about organ transplantation, stem-cell research, and human cloning? What kind of care do we owe one another at the end of life? Is euthanasia a Christian option? Using a dialogue format, an ethicist and physician talk about how to think about thorny ethical issues. Combining their backgrounds in medicine and theology, they deal with real-life moral questions in an accessible way. C. Ben Mitchell and D. Joy Riley let readers eavesdrop on their conversation about the training of doctors, the interpretation of the Bible, and controversial issues like abortion, assisted-suicide, genetic engineering, and in vitro fertilization. The book examines these topics under three general headings: the taking of life, the making of life, and the faking of life. Christian Bioethics is a guidebook for pastors, health care professionals and families—anyone facing difficult decisions about health care.