New Books In Medicine

Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that an enormous proportion of medical care worldwide is provided under the auspices of religious organizations, there has been a sustained and systematic campaign to drive out those with religious worldviews from the field of bioethics and indeed, from medicine itself. Obviously, this constitutes blatant discrimination against patients, the unborn, the elderly and the otherwise vulnerable and their families and faith-oriented medical providers and religiously-oriented bioethicists. But more importantly, the loss of a theological sensibility among scholars and providers and the consequent diminishment of fellow feeling for patients whose lives are suffused with religiosity is stripping away the foundations of compassion that religion has provided medicine since both entered the human scene. That is the thrust of the 2021 book, Losing Our Dignity: How Secularized Medicine is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality (New City Press, 2021) by the bioethicist and theologian