Bearing Witness: Religious Meanings in Bioethics
Ebook
Overview
In Bearing Witness, Courtney S. Campbell draws on his experience as a teacher, scholar, and a bioethics consultant to propose an innovative interpretation of the significance of religious values and traditions for bioethics and health care. The book offers a distinctive exposition of a covenantal ethic of gift-response-responsibility-transformation that informs a quest for meaning in the profound choices that patients, families, and professionals face in creating, sustaining, and ending life. Campbell’s account of “bearing witness” offers new understandings of formative ethical concepts, situates medicine as a calling and vocation rooted in concepts of healing, affirms professional commitments of presence for suffering and dying persons, and presents a prophetic critique of medical-assisted death. This book offers compelling critiques of secular models of medical professionalism and of individualistic assumptions that distort the physician-patient relationship. This innovative interpretation bears witness to the relevance of religious perspectives on an array of bioethical issues from new reproductive technologies to genetics to debates over end-of-life ethics and bears witness against the oddities of a market-oriented and consumerist vision of health care that is especially salient for an era of health-care reform.
“Campbell captures what is missing from the modern medical
discourse, a gap filled by ‘bearing witness’ to the human condition
inherent in medical encounters. Drawing on concepts, tools, and
methods of religious studies, he offers a more complete bioethics
with a thicker narrative construct. The new bioethics that emerges,
deeply rooted in familiar traditions, will make this book a
classroom treasure.”
—Felicia Cohn, Bioethics Director, Kaiser Permanente, Orange
County
“Bearing Witness is a personally compelling and powerful
statement of the importance of religion in bioethics and health
care. Campbell rightly rejects the dominant tradition of
contemporary bioethics for its religious and spiritual emptiness.
In its place, he argues for the centrality of religion in bearing
witness to: the image of persons, the burdens of care, suffering,
and the experience of dying. He demonstrates how pluralist
religious perspectives can enrich and humanize bioethics even as
they nurture the human quest for meaning.”
—Thomas R. Cole, McGovern Chair in Medical Humanities
“For three decades, Courtney Campbell has been an important voice
in bioethics. In this book, rich with personal and narrative
insight, he offers both a critique of and a constructive
alternative to dominant trends in medicine and biomedical ethics.
Campbell challenges recent efforts in secular bioethics to
marginalize religious voices and calls on medicine to renew its
vocational commitment to the healing of persons rather than
to be understood as simply another career choice.”
—Andrew Lustig, Professor of Religion and Science, Davidson
College
“In Bearing Witness, Courtney Campbell brings scholarly
erudition, seasoned experience in a range of medical cultures,
religious commitment, and prophetic insights to bear on theory and
practice in bioethics. Drawing on years of teaching, research, and
policy analysis, Campbell engages a range of religious and secular
thinkers about matters fundamental to bioethics, especially those
that concern meaning, suffering, and healing. I highly
recommend this thoughtful and well-reasoned book.
—Richard Miller, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor, University of
Chicago
Product Details
- Title : Bearing Witness: Religious Meanings in Bioethics
- Author: Campbell, Courtney S.
- Publisher: Cascade Books
- Publication Date: 2019
- ISBN: 9781532662751
Courtney S. Campbell is the Hundere Professor of Religion and
Culture and Director of the Program in Medical Humanities at Oregon
State University. A scholar in medical ethics and religious ethics,
Campbell has written reports on religion and bioethics for federal
advisory commissions and has served on ethics committees for local,
regional, and national hospice programs on physician-assisted
death. He is a fellow of The Hastings Center.