Gilbert Meilaender

To live or to die? When the time comes, Gilbert Meilaender wants his fate in his family’s hands, not his own. From the October 1991 issue. Recently I was a speaker and panel member at a small educational workshop on “advance directives” sponsored by the ethics committee of our local hospital. . . . . Continue Reading »

A Brief Inquiry Into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, With “On My Religion” by John Rawls Harvard, 275 pages, $27.95 To read A Brief Inquiry is to be led to ponder whether, as Wordsworth wrote, the child is father of the man. For the book makes available a text that was not generally known . . . . Continue Reading »

Dear Hannah, I know you saw the news almost a year ago about the successful cloning of human embryos by a company in California. I’m pretty sure we talked about it at the time. Unlike the claims a few years ago by Korean researchers, which turned out to be fraudulent, this one seems genuine. . . . . Continue Reading »

Save the World on Your Own Time by Stanley Fish Oxford University Press, 208 pages, $19.95 Here is Stanley Fish, writing Save the World on Your Own Time : “Not only is the genuinely academic classroom full of passion and commitment; it is more interesting than the alternative. The really dull . . . . Continue Reading »

In The Patient as Person , published almost forty years ago, when transplantation technology was still in its early stages, Paul Ramsey considered different ways of procuring organs for transplant. One might invite people to “opt in,” to donate organs to be used after their death (or, in . . . . Continue Reading »

Nothing is more common in life than a seeming tension between the freedom of individuals and the authority of communities and their designated leaders. From individual citizens who must set aside their own desires and obey laws they think unwise, to athletes who must subordinate their individual . . . . Continue Reading »

Persons: The Difference Between “Someone”?and “Something” by Robert Spaemann Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $85 WE SOMETIMES encounter questions that are both philosophically puzzling and practically significant. The temptation then is to bypass the philosophical puzzles . . . . Continue Reading »

Those of us Protestants whose heritage is relatively congregational may sometimes find ourselves thinking things would be better if only we had bishops to provide the sort of guidance that gives the church theological direction in a world that constantly raises new and difficult questions. Such a . . . . Continue Reading »

Making a long drive home from a meeting late last summer, I found myself hungry in the early afternoon. I needed something that would be quick, inexpensive, and good. And there (providentially?) was the sign: a Burger King off the next exit. I felt like a flame-grilled Whopper, and the beauty of it . . . . Continue Reading »

Once there was no politics in the “pre-political” society God created. One day there will be no politics, in the society gathered around the throne of the Lamb. But, for now, political society exists as “a moment in parentheses,” and its structure is trinitarian in character. It . . . . Continue Reading »