Jewish and Catholic Bioethics
Jewish and Catholic Bioethics: An Ecumenical Dialogue.
Edmund D. Pellegrino and Alan I. Faden, editors.
Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1999. 176 pp. $22.95 (Softcover).

Pellegrino and Faden present papers from a 1996 conference sponsored by Georgetown University and Aish Hatorah, an Orthodox Jewish institution. The first section consists of an essay on Spinoza and Judaism. Subsequent sections include chapters written by both Catholics and Jews on general themes: ethics as philosophy; the sanctity of human life; suffering and the sufferer; and healing and the healer.

The book includes some interesting and even enlightening papers, as I shall explain below, but it unfortunately does not fulfill the promise in its subtitle, for it is neither ecumenical nor a dialogue. It fails on the first count because five of its six Jewish authors—including Tom Beauchamp, Baruch Brody, Shimon Glick, Fred Rosner, Avraham Steinberg, and Moshe Tendler—are Orthodox, and the sixth, Ronald Green, describes himself as "a modern, secularized moral philosopher of Jewish background." With the Orthodox comprising less than 7 percent of America's Jews, one would have hoped that the other movements in Judaism, to which the remaining 93 percent of America's affiliated Jews belong, would have been represented, perhaps even proportionally. That is the clearly the result—and the price—of sponsorship by Aish Hatorah, for the Orthodox generally discount other approaches to Judaism, and this book suffers from that prejudice and blindness.

Even within such confines, the book—and the conference on which it is based—missed a golden opportunity for true dialogue among the participants. One can imagine short responses to the major presentations by someone from the author's tradition and someone from the other tradition—as, for example, in Three Faiths, One God: A Jewish, Christian, Muslim Encounter, edited by John Hick and Edmund Meltzer, where all three Western faiths come into dialogue. Alternatively, the authors could have addressed the same case so as to provide focused dialogue; or the book literally could have recorded an actual conversation on specific issues. Instead, what we have here is a collection of papers that are, at best, only loosely connected to each other. The first chapter, on Spinoza and Judaism is a good essay, but it has no clear connection to the topic of Jewish and Catholic bioethics at all. The lack of confrontation throughout the book prevents readers from seeing that Catholic author David Thomasma and Tendler, for example, in essays placed in different sections of the book, are taking markedly different stances toward infertility treatments and research on human embryos. It is precisely those differences that a different structure for the book could have made clear.

The other major fault I find with this book is its lack of attention to methodology—that is, how you should apply the tradition to gain moral guidance on both the old and new issues in bioethics. Beauchamp's essay on the nontraditional Spinoza and on Judaism demonstrates the differences between those two approaches to moral issues, but he never applies that to bioethics. Green devotes a footnote to methodology in which he first denies, and then supports, Louis Newman's trenchant point that Jewish legal precedents must be understood and applied with attention to their—and our—historical, moral, and theological contexts. As a result, as Newman says, one can only claim to present a Jewish approach to bioethics—and hopefully one that explains and justifies why it is reading the tradition in a particular way. One certainly cannot pretend to articulate the Jewish attitude, as Glick, for example, says he is doing and as Green and all the other Orthodox writers clearly think they are doing.

It is a pity that the Catholic writers—Thomasma and Pellegrino along with J. D. Cassidy and James Keenan—did not delve into this question either, for it would have been a real contribution for the Catholics and Jews involved to discuss how they derive moral guidance from their traditions—and to discuss the alternative ways that they reject. Since Judaism and Catholicism are much more self-consciously shaped by ongoing tradition than Protestantism is, to see how people devoted to these two religions interweave sacred scriptures with tradition in resolving contemporary issues in bioethics—together with any other resources they use—would have been enlightening indeed.

All that said, I found some of the articles in this book wonderful. Chief among those is Keenan's essay on suffering, where he compares Jewish and Christian approaches to suffering and spells out what we should all learn from Psalms and Job as to how to respond to people's suffering. That essay alone—and some others as well—make the book worthwhile.

Moving Religion to the Center of Bioethics
Notes from a Narrow Ridge: Religion and Bioethics.
Dena S. Davis and Laurie Zoloth, editors.
Hagerstown, Md.: University Publishing Group, 1999. 288 pp. $24.95 (Hardcover).

Notes from a Narrow Ridge: Religion and Bioethics, a diverse collection of essays, describes how religious studies can contribute to the discipline of bioethics. Dena Davis's opening essay and Laurie Zoloth's concluding essay frame a rich discussion among a diverse group of religious studies scholars who do bioethics. Dena Davis is clear that, at a minimum, religious studies allows healthcare practitioners to be sensitive to the religious concerns of their patients. She cautions religious ethicists to make clear their agenda and to clarify to whom their views apply. For example, she cites Fred Rosner's failure to indicate in an article on Tay–Sachs screening that not all Jews are Orthodox and that other forms of Judaism differ with Orthodoxy. Laurie Zoloth in her response to Davis argues that her coeditor limits herself to an insufficient sociological perspective, i.e., this is what Jews believe. Zoloth states that bioethics and religion both serve a legitimizing and prophetic function. Using Judaism as her example, she seeks to expand the bioethical conversation.

This entire volume invites conversation. The essays range from a review of the historical development of bioethics as a discipline and the decline in the influence of religious bioethics to the complex and ambiguous role that religious bioethics plays in the public policy debate regarding such issues as abortion, active euthanasia, cloning, and healthcare reform.

Faith-based bioethics is both descriptive and proscriptive. Author Ron Green, for example, identifies the questions and answers that religion-based bioethics asks and answers:

• What is the meaning of suffering in the context of human life and cosmic reality?
• How should we regard the physical body and its functions?
• What is the meaning and role of gender differences, sexuality, and reproduction?
• How are we to understand and respond to birth, aging, and death?
• What constitutes the self, and how is selfhood to be assessed?
• How are sin and moral culpability understood?
• What makes something sinful, and how is sin relieved or absolved?
• What are the tradition's specific bioethical teachings? How authoritative are they, and who is regarded as their proper interpreter?

These questions and their answers form what essayist Thomas Shanahan describes as a value-added discussion:

There are inevitable clashes between traditional religious views, but giving them a voice can enrich the way a society looks at the human condition and the nature of its responsibilities.

Although this volume is written for and by academics, it initiates interfaith conversation. Colleges and universities with no formal religious affiliation are increasingly pursuing religious studies; often these institutions have medical schools and links to the great teaching and research hospitals. As such, a bioethical conversation that is limited to the Enlightenment model—which removes the role of religion and holds patient autonomy as its highest value—inadequately addresses the issues raised by new technologies, the disparity between the haves and have-nots of the healthcare world, the scarcity and abundance of resources and their fair and ethical distribution. Postmodernism acknowledges that our universalism is rooted in our particularity and that to ignore that particularity—whether it is based on religion, class, or gender—creates a false concept of "the human being in general." We must instead plan and care for people who are grounded in their particularity.

A powerful sequel to this wonderful collection of essays could be a volume that draws into conversation clergy, chaplains, and healthcare providers, who all directly consult with patients and families. Academic ethics and practical ethics must always be in conversation. The insights of religious tradition often touch the adherents during moments of decision making in a way that belies how they seem to live their lives.

Dena Davis and Laurie Zoloth, as well as the other authors, raise issues that require ongoing examination. The book will be useful to all who want to explore the role that religion can and ought to play in bioethical decisions that affect the lives of individuals and society as a whole. The methodology and issues of various religious traditions are part of the currency of individuals and their communities, influencing their attitudes and helping to determine the meaning of their lives. Religious bioethics enriches the conversation without eclipsing the contribution from philosophical bioethics.

Chaos, Coeternal with God
Pandemonium Tremendum: Chaos and Mystery in the Life of God.
James E. Huchingson.
Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 2001. 224 pp. $17.00 (Softcover).

Human beings employ socially powerful metaphors to understand God and the cosmos. During the industrial revolution, mechanism played this metaphorical role; organic metaphors became prevalent in the twentieth century. With the rise of digital computers, James Huchingson employs communication and systems theory, which he supplements with insights drawn from Alfred North Whitehead, derived process theologies, and Paul Tillich.

In introductory chapters Huchingson justifies "God-talk" and cosmological speculation, defends metaphysics, and outlines communication and systems theory. He then begins his "exercise in constructive theology" with the primordial chaos—the "pandemonium tremendum" of his title. Chaos "is infinite variety, absolute noise, and complete absence of systematic arrangement and integrity." According to Huchingson, this chaos is coeternal with God, serves as the source of divine power and sovereignty, and "is the storehouse for the abundance that originates and nourishes the creation." In the primal act of self-creation, God's "in-speaking" gave rise to God as "will, witness, and intention." God then became "outspoken" and fully determinate through communication that gave rise to, and continues to sustain, a creation to which God then relates through "give and take." Metaphorically situated between the pandemonium tremendum and the creation, God "is both the source of all being, the witness of the primordial chaos, and the sorter, the dominant determiner of arrangement in creation and the power of difference." From the infinite variety and potentiality of the pandemonium tremendum, God, like a gatekeeper, decisively and continually sorts and selects that which goes forth to originate, elaborate, and sustain the creation.

Within the creation God balances the release of liberating variety with the constraint of order to allow creatures to maximize their own fulfillment as kybernetai, or normally living, dynamic open systems that seek "relevantial information" and adjust themselves according to feedback loops and other forms of communication. Human kybernetai share with all sentient and insentient beings the imago mundi, the image of the world, even as humans reflect the imago Dei, in which humans possess Godlike features and God possesses humanlike features—including "self-conscious decision processes," personhood, the management of variety, and learning in the process of cocreation. In his penultimate chapter Huchingson recasts the traditional doctrines of divine providence, judgment, and revelation in communication-systems terms. In his conclusion he acknowledges some of the shortcomings of his account, especially regarding God's ontological subordination to the pandemonium tremendum and the conceptual problems in accounting for the links between the pandemonium tremendum, God, and creation.

Fruitful insights arise from his communication-systems approach to theology and metaphysics. I found particularly stimulating his contrast between cosmologies in the West that traditionally subsume variety and difference under rational ideals within the divine mind, and the cosmology his model suggests of a universe "that is profoundly irregular and consists of creaturely inhabitants who are (to risk an oxymoron) uniformly irregular as well." He elaborates:

Science has neglected this diversity in efforts to discover universal laws. Yet it needs to be celebrated for what it is: "a fundamental truth about reality richly suggestive for theology and science alike."

Huchingson is writing for the guild of philosophical theologians and process theologians. Outsiders may find him heavy reading. But pregnant suggestions, such as a God that revels in variety and individuality, can make the occasionally heavy slogging worthwhile.