Abstract Careful critical analysis is central to reigning in untutored desires to claim the current canons of political correctness, social assumptions, or personal intuitions as moral truth or as necessarily reliable indicators of appropriate choice. This outlook is particularly essential in medicine since its conceptual and moral convictions are not merely theoretical but are applied directly (often irretrievably) to persons. The growing cleft between traditional Christianity and the methodological atheism of contemporary bioethics colors the very contours of how one appreciates public deliberation regarding morality and medicine. It shapes what is judged acceptable social debate and appropriate moral discussion, proper institutional goals and objectives of public policy. As the authors in this issue of Christian Bioethics reflect, while there exist family resemblances among various accounts of medical professionalism, claims that medicine is governed by uniquely true and universal secular moral obligations is implausible, especially given how far contemporary medical practice has drifted from traditional Christian understandings. Christian witness and traditionally Christian bioethics are central elements of a distinctly Christian practice of medicine.
Mark J. Cherry (Tue,) studied this question.