Bioethics

William Hurlbut explores current neurobiological advancements and the ethics and dangers of biotechnology interventions that go beyond therapy. (62 minutes)

Oliver O’Donovan raises questions about IVF and the technologically ordered motive for efficiency

In this essay, Brad Littlejohn and Clare Morell decry how modern technology tends to hack the human person in pursuit of profit. (55 minutes)

FROM VOL. 98 Moral philosopher Gilbert Meilaender examines the question of human dignity and its place within political discourse. (25 minutes)

FROM VOL. 60 Russell Hittinger explains the legal history behind the “right to privacy” and how it was used in landmark cases involving abortion and physician-assisted suicide. (33 minutes)

Ethicist Paul Ramsey (1913–1988) challenges “the unchecked employment of powers the biological revolution places in human hands.”

Gilbert Meilaender on the temptation to instrumentalize our bodies

Leon Kass on the re-configuring of human origins

C. Ben Mitchell and Carl Elliott examine how we form judgments about bioethical questions, and how various medical capabilities form us. (27 minutes)

In a 2003 interview, Leon Kass discussed his book Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics. The unifying theme in the book’s essays is the threat of dehumanization in one form or another. (36 minutes)

Continuing our time travel back to 1992, we hear two more interviews from the pilot tape for the Mars Hill Tapes, with sociologist James Davison Hunter and bioethicist Nigel Cameron. (28 minutes)

Today’s Feature presents a reading of a 2007 article by Gilbert Meilaender that explores the significance for bioethics of the mystery of human being as body and soul. (39 minutes)

FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs

Theologian and ethicist Gilbert Meilaender discusses some of the themes he explores in two of his books: Body, Soul and Bioethics; and Bioethics: A Primer for Christians. (19 minutes)

Dr. Kimbell Kornu, who teaches health care ethics and palliative medicine at St. Louis University, talks about why modern medicine can’t adequately explain health or suffering, even as doctors promote health and try to eliminate suffering. (28 minutes)

Jeffrey Bishop explains how modern Western medicine is intertwined with politics and technology within a vision of progress that has an eschatological quality to it. (25 minutes)

Ken Myers shares a summary of six recent books that we want our listeners to know about but whose authors we won’t be interviewing. (15 minutes)

FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright

In a lecture presented in Washington in 2018, philosopher Michael Hanby argues that the meaning of the human is being radically redefined in our modern “biotechnocracy.” (57 minutes)

FEATURED GUESTS: Gilbert Meilaender, Ron Highfield, Mark Mitchell, Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Helen Rhee, and Peter Brown