Bioethics from a Faith Perspective

Book excerpt: Discover the spiritual community's position on bioethics issues! Bioethics from a Faith Perspective: Ethics in Health Care for the Twenty-First Century offers a meaningful, rational, faith-oriented framework for deciding how to deal with important biomedical health care issues. Organ donation, managed care, the Human Genome Project, and medical technology that keeps people alive beyond their “natural” life span are some of the topics it illuminates through case analysis and resolution. Since almost all textbooks in bioethics omit the religious dimension of life (even though the field was inspired and stimulated by religious scholars at Princeton and Yale), this is an indispensable volume. While most people state their moral positions from the background of their religious traditions, many have not had the opportunity to study the relation between their faith perspectives and the difficult issues that arise in the pursuit of health care. This book shows the relevance, significance, and guidance that a faith perspective can offer for dealing with bioethical issues. This unique and thoughtful book: shows you how to distinguish and describe the relation between technical and ethical aspects of health-related issues provides you with a framework of moral principles, theories, values, and faith viewpoints teaches you the defining characteristics of a moral professional-client relationship related to faith helps you to discern when medical ethics and faith commitments are therapeutic and when they are not gives examples describing a moral problem, a faith perspective, and a justified position on that problem Since bioethics has been an amazing story of growth from the 1950s to the present day and is still expanding, there will be changes. Bioethics from a Faith Perspective stimulates that expansion by including the religious dimension. It is the perfect supplement to the existing literature on the subject.