Category: Health and Medicine
Book Review: The End of the Christian Life by J. Todd Billings
We live in a death-denying and death-defying culture. We know, on an intellectual level, that one day we will die, yet we tend to avoid contemplating this inescapable truth more than is strictly necessary. For modern people, death is an...
The Cross Amidst a Plague: Choosing Cruciformity Over Self-Interest
In the weeks leading to Easter, Americans found themselves, religious or not, on an enforced fast from normal life. The liturgical feelings associated with Lent became the daily realities of uneasiness, mourning, fear. There are the real personal fears, the...
What the Coronavirus Reveals: An Invitation to American Evangelicals Who Have Been Quoting that C.S. Lewis Essay
The argument of this essay is simple. I want to invite Christians, particularly American evangelicals, to a new consideration of how the coronavirus might cause them to rethink what kind of healthcare policy ought to mark a flourishing society. I...
Medical (and Theological) Reasoning in a Pandemic
“a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;” Ecclesiastes 3:3 A Common Word Between Medicine and the Church My day begins at 5:30 am. Not a bad start....
Prudence, Paranoia, and Loving Our Neighbor
“Will a surplus Russian gas mask protect me from coronavirus, or should I buy an actual respirator?” These are the questions we ponder on social media in the year of our Lord 2020. Three weeks into the United States’ experience...
Our Lives or Our Freedoms: The Fear of Tyranny in a Time of Pandemic
There’s a famous scene in the movie, Braveheart, a 1995 film that became something of a classic among embattled Christian conservatives who liked to see our own battle with “Big Government” in the romanticized terms of a Scottish epic. Riding...
The Ethics of Healthcare Rationing
The call comes in the middle of my clinic session at the hospital in rural Kenya where I work. I apologize to the patient in front of me and answer my phone. It’s the emergency department at the hospital in...
Against An Economy Financed by Human Bodies
By Andreas Vesalius During my teenage years, I experienced periods of intense disdain for my physicality. In becoming fully aware of my sexuality and my existence as a sexual being, I came to oppose such an existence. I envied the...
Book Review: Between Life and Death by Kathryn Butler
In their indispensable book Reclaiming the Body, Joel Shuman and Brian Volck recall a course on literature and medicine taught to 4th-year medical students. Students were asked to describe how they hoped to die with essays, and the results were...
Faithful Suffering and Medicine After “The Baconian Project”
By John Brewer Eberly, Jr., MD and Ben Frush, MD We recently published a case commentary in the AMA Journal of Ethics titled, “What Should Physicians and Chaplains Do When a Patient Believes God Wants Him to Suffer?” which has us...