The substantive center of Christian ethics is Jesus’s ministry of the kingdom or reign of God, and its preferential inclusion of the poor, the outcast, and the sinner. What defines a gospel-based bioethics is a hopeful, practical commitment to improve the health of those who are most vulnerable to illness and early death because they lack basic needs. This commitment is distinctive of Christian bioethics, if not “unique” in the sense that no other bioethical approaches or traditions share it. To (...) succeed in reducing disparities in access to health care requires cooperative social action with members of multiple moral and political communities, meaning that there is no strict boundary between secular and Christian bioethics at the practical, political level, the level of applied Christian social ethics. (shrink)

First, to what level of quality can medical ethics a spire, if it ignores callous discrimination in medrcal practice against large populations of the innocent poor? Second, how effective can such theories be in addressing the critical issues of medical and clinical ethics if they are unable to contribute to the closing of the gap of sociomedical disparity?Marcio Fabri dos Anjos, Medical Ethics in the Developing World: A Liberation Theology Perspective.

Jeffrey Bishop’s The Anticipatory Corpse exposes a functional metaphysics at the root of contemporary medical practice that gives rise to inhumane medicine, especially at the end of life. His critique of medicine argues for alternative spaces and practices in which the communal significance of the body, its telos, can be restored and the meaning of a “good death” enriched. This essay develops an alternative epistemology of the body, drawing from Christian theological accounts of the communal or Eucharistic body and linking (...) liturgical practices to the cultivation of solidarity. It argues for an epistemology of the body that makes visible the invisible bodies at medicine’s margins and illumines the disparate worlds of health care globally. (shrink)