Earlier this year, I was skimming the table of contents for Ethics & Medicine Spring 2011. I noticed an essay on forced sterilization of Native American women in the 1970s and immediately thought of a friend of mine, a doctor who serves the Chickasaw Indian Nation in Oklahoma (and he happens to hold a JD degree as well). I called him to ask for his assessment of the essay. Guess what? He had not seen the journal, for one simple reason: he had not renewed his membership with CBHD.
We rectified that situation promptly, and in a follow-up conversation, I gathered he had a different perspective than the author of the essay. They were both at our 2011 summer conference . . . I hope they had an opportunity for charitable, scholarly conversation.
If you are reading this issue of Dignitas, it is likely that you are a member of CBHD. If you are, thank you. If you are not a member, I warmly invite you to join. Both Dignitas and Ethics & Medicine are benefits of membership, along with discounts for our summer conference, conference recordings, and other journals and publications. For your convenience, online registration is available at www.cbhd.org/supportjoin.
One way you can invest in a Christian voice in bioethics is through encouraging others to become members. CBHD membership is not a profit center (the membership fee covers only direct costs), but a means of enlarging the community of those who care about thoughtful Christian engagement in the profound questions of human dignity and flourishing.
In this less-formal-than-usual column, I also want to share excerpts from my opening remarks, and my post-conference observations (in italics), from our 2011 national conference, “The Scandal of Bioethics: Reclaiming Christian Influence in in Technology, Science & Medicine.” Look for a fuller report—with photos!—in the Fall issue of Dignitas.
In my opening remarks, I referred to Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994), an indictment of intellectual abdication. Noll claimed in a scathing judgment that “the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” (Throughout the conference, we witnessed a rebuttal to that claim, as we attended to perceptive analysis and insights from a wide array of scholars).
There is still a scandal, and it’s a scandal within bioethics. Albert Jonsen writes in The Birth of Bioethics:
The Catholic and Protestant traditions entered the era of bioethics with a rich heritage of theoretical reflection and practical admonition about the moral life. Both traditions brought an indelible conviction that all humans are uniquely valued by the Creator and Redeemer, that each person is responsible for his or her life and choices, and that human choices can be designated as right and wrong, according to certain norms. . . . [B]oth traditions brought to bioethics a wisdom about the moral life and a dexterity in discourse about moral behavior.”[1]
We desperately need that wisdom again. Bioethics has its roots in Christianity. In the late 1970s, Stanley Hauerwas and James Gustafson wrote that
as medical ethics became a growth industry in the academic world, and as the traditional religious and theological bases for the work apparently lost significance, many of the theologically trained speakers and writers repressed, denied or became indifferent to theology as a field. The historic religious communities of our culture, which are the bearers of symbols and traditions and of patterns of thought about practical moral questions, were seen even by persons who belonged to them to be divisive.[2]
Although our conference speakers represented three streams in Christendom—Orthodox, Roman Catholic and evangelical— they were united in theme and purpose.
So, the scandal of bioethics is not, as Noll put it, the absence of the evangelical mind, but the disappearance of theologians or explicitly Christian discourse from the newly minted field of bioethics. (The conference gave us reason to be more hopeful.)
Mark Noll’s book appeared fifteen years later, the same year as the first CBHD summer conference. The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity was born in 1993. John Kilner, Nigel Cameron, Harold O.J. Brown and a small group of visionaries helped launch a “kingdom project” to engage bioethics from a Christian perspective, to reclaim that land so carelessly yielded. (And the Center has never given up on that vision.)
Nearly twenty years later, what can we say? Did they succeed? Have we succeeded? Has our “rigorous research, theological and conceptual analysis, charitable critique, and thoughtful engagement” made any difference? Is there a Christian influence in technology, science, and medicine to be reclaimed? (We strongly assert, Yes!)
How would you answer? Whether or not you attended the conference, these are important questions. These are the problems that drive us to keep at it. We are not content to generate activity, but are committed to push harder, see farther, reflect more deeply, and network more broadly.
[1] Albert Jonsen, The Birth of Bioethics (New York: Oxford, 1998), 41.
[2] As quoted in Jonsen, 57-58.
Paige Comstock Cunningham, "From the Director's Desk,” Dignitas 18, no. 2 (2011): 1, 5.
