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The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth. Edited by Richard E. Burnett. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2013), Pp. xxviii + 242. A handbook, at least ideally, is something specialists provide for [...]

Theologians often address technology where it influences how humans address the world, while policy makers and moral philosophers are primarily interested in technological techniques and devices. Biomedical enhancement offers the best possibilities to theologically approach how technology directly affects life.

Most theoretical approaches in bioethics begin with a theory that articulates and defends basic principles or rules that are more or less systematically related and that seek to yield more or less precise conclusions with regard to specific acts, cases, or policies. Concerns about the agent and descriptions of the context of action stand on the margins of the theory. This is ironic, given the overwhelming importance and impact the training of health care professionals has upon them and upon the practice of health care as a whole, and given the fact that many advocates of the theories themselves concede that one's beliefs and how one describes a situation and weighs 'facts' and values relevant to the case strongly determine one's conclusions. While morality may not lead ineluctably to religion, as Kant believed, bioethics does appear inevitably to involve particularity. I examine the work of James M. Gustafson and Stanley Hauerwas to analyze two views of the role of particularity in bioethics. I then show the relevance of their work for addressing some problems with the practicality and concreteness of current models in bioethics.

By William Werpehowski. Moral Traditions Series. Washington: Georgetown University, 2002. Pp. xi + 232. $24.95. A book on the legacy of H. Richard Niebuhr in theological ethics invites skepticism. Surely [...]

Observers of biomedical policy are likely to find themselves in a position familiar to students of Zeno's paradoxes. No matter how quickly policy advances occur, they will never be able [...]

Theologies of human nature routinely reflect the insights of evolutionary biology, for which human biological nature is variable, changing and indeterminate in its boundaries with other living things. However, these theologies do not yet reflect what biotechnology discloses about human biological nature, namely, that it is malleable and indeterminate in its boundaries with machines. Does respect for human biological nature as created by God, or protection of the human person whose nature it is, require us to refrain from taking advantage of its malleability and indeterminacy to select or design functions and traits? Or should we welcome malleability and indeterminacy as conditions for us to fulfill a vocation to determine our nature or bring it to perfection? And do malleability and indeterminacy render obsolete the notion that we look to our nature to determine what our good is? This article answers these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]