From requests for childfree restaurants to a preference for childfree worship, it seems that American society has a strange relationship toward the young. Innovative human relations experts recommend bowls of candy, Nerf basketball, and company birthday parties so that employees can recreate with other adults during the ever-expanding workday. Thus enjoying their productivity, adults may avoid contact with the next generation, while perpetuating their own youth. A post-modern church “experience” offers some congregants a similarly comfortable setting.

"What is bioethics?" Friends, family, acquaintances, and even complete strangers posed this question as my wife and I told people that we were moving so that I could attend school and study bioethics. In fact, the more people we told, the more obvious it became that very few people understood the term. Of course, it is one thing to be familiar with a specific, technical term and another to be knowledgeable of its underlying issues.

Bioethical--and especially biotechnological--developments are both so urgent and have come so quickly upon us that there has been little time for Christian bioethicists to reflect upon or develop a coherent methodological approach.

Debates over bioethical issues necessarily involve people from diverse circles. Scientists, health care professionals, lawyers, clergy, and representatives from other disciplines join formally trained bioethicists in assessing the appropriateness of various forays within medicine and biotechnology. It is my hypothesis that the way scientists think is often so fundamentally different that the "answers" to bioethical issues offered by the non-scientific community are perceived as (at best) only minimally relevant by those who are actually pursuing the research in question.