Gilbert Meilaender

Just Work by Russell Muirhead Harvard University Press, 224 pp. $24.95 That work is essential to human life, few will doubt. Whether it should also hold some more exalted place in life”whether, rather than just working to live, we should also live to work”is less clear. It is an issue . . . . Continue Reading »

A good bit of public attention in recent years has been focused on developments at the beginning of life: new reproductive technologies, for instance, and research on embryos. But questions about what we ought to do for those near the end of life may be more enduring and are, at least by my lights, . . . . Continue Reading »

Democracy and Tradition ”the fruit of years of reflection and development by the author”actually comprises essays on three quite different topics. They are held together chiefly by a view of democratic tradition as a largely habitual (as opposed to rationally necessary) . . . . Continue Reading »

In the movie Memento (released in 2001) the central character, Leonard Shelby, sustains a blow to the head from an intruder who has already raped and killed Shelby’s wife. The movie tells the story of Shelby’s search to find and kill that intruder, but his search is enormously complicated . . . . Continue Reading »

I had occasion recently to ponder the service folder from a wedding. In many respects this wedding could probably have taken place in any Protestant church, though it happened to be Lutheran. Indeed, the rather good music might have suggested a Lutheran setting, even as the utter lack of . . . . Continue Reading »

Near the beginning of the twenty-fourth and last Book of Homer’s Iliad , called by Simone Weil “the only true epic” the West possesses, even the gods”detached as they are in their bliss from all suffering”have seen enough. Achilles has become inhuman. Ignoring our . . . . Continue Reading »

Events of recent months”in particular, the execution of Timothy McVeigh and, just prior to it, public airing for the first time of audio tapes of executions in Georgia”have focused attention on the morality of the death penalty, even if administered fairly and equitably. For better or . . . . Continue Reading »

In one of the classic early discussions about the possible uses of advancing genetic knowledge to control and reshape human life, Paul Ramsey, more than thirty years ago, wrote the following: I . . . raise the question whether a scientist has not an entirely “frivolous conscience” who, . . . . Continue Reading »

In 1986 H. Tristram Engelhardt published his widely read book, The Foundations of Bioethics . A second edition followed in 1996. Both editions carried the stamp of Engelhardt’s proudly displayed “Texian” (as in the “Republic of Texas”) commitment to liberty and his . . . . Continue Reading »

Sexuality and the Christian Body By Eugene F. Rogers, Jr. Blackwell. 303 pp. $62.95. The blurbs on the back cover of this book create in the potential reader an expectation of something new”a creative, original approach to the morality of homosexual acts, not just a rehashing of standard . . . . Continue Reading »