Unprecedented Choices

By Audrey R Chapman and Audrey R. Chapman

With vast new scientific and technological powers, we face unprecedented choices for which traditional ethics provide little direct guidance. What role can the religious community play in addressing the ethical and theological issues that even science now acknowledges as urgent? Chapman's work forges a method for integrating ethical reasoning with scientific data, focusing on four issues -- cloning, genetic engineering, patenting of life, and environmental alteration. For each, she reviews the work of religious thinkers, assesses the roles of the religious community, considers relevant confessional differences, determines how traditional theological and ethical concepts can be clarified, reformulated, and "operationalized" to meet the questions, and finally she formulates helpful methodological options. She calls for a scientifically informed religious ethics built dialogically from concepts in both science and theology.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0800631811
• ISBN13: 9780800631819
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishing
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A Valuable Survey on Issues of Vital Interest

Chapman's work is primarily a survey of mainly religious but also secular materials that evaluate the growing number of ethical issues raised by the realities and prospects of genetic engineering. Chapman details the contributions of individual ethicists and theologians, the statements of several significant Church bodies, as well as the conclusions of specific tasks forces and working groups that include religious voices. Among the topics surveyed are questions about cloning, the patenting of life forms, and fundamental questions of human nature that are raised by the science of genetics (e.g., free will vs. genetic determinism, the question of the soul). Chapman's main concern is that the seriousness of the issues have not been matched by a depth of theological inquiry. While the book is more descriptive than evaluative, her critique of the genetic reductionism of E. O. Wilson's sociobiology is a most helpful discussion. The book is highly recommended as a general survey of many of the key issues and much of the current literature on a vital area of great ethical consequence--an area that affects all of God's creation.