Christian Bioethics: A Guide for Pastors, Health Care Professionals, and Families

Overview

Living in an era of highly technical medicine is comforting and sometimes confusing. How should Christians make life and death decisions? How do we move from an ancient text like the Bible to twenty-first-century questions about organ transplantation, stem-cell research, and human cloning? What kind of care do we owe one another at the end of life? Is euthanasia a Christian option?

Using a dialogue format, an ethicist and physician talk about how to think about thorny ethical issues. Combining their backgrounds in medicine and theology, they deal with real-life moral questions in an accessible way. C. Ben Mitchell and D. Joy Riley let readers eavesdrop on their conversation about the training of doctors, the interpretation of the Bible, and controversial issues like abortion, assisted-suicide, genetic engineering, and in vitro fertilization.

The book examines these topics under three general headings: the taking of life, the making of life, and the faking of life. Christian Bioethics is a guidebook for pastors, health care professionals and families—anyone facing difficult decisions about health care.