Bearing Witness
Religious Meanings in Bioethics
- Science & Faith
- Ethics, Culture & Social Issues
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2019
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Publisher's Description
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.
Endorsements (4)
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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