"We're living in a schizophrenic way." That admission came from Jeffrey Kahn, who directs the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics, during a "Socratic dialogue" on the role of religion in medical ethics. The program organizers had me pretending I was television producer and host Fred Friendly, strolling with a microphone and jabbing provocative questions at a panel of 10 experts.

Dr. Kahn, sitting at one end of the panel, spoke with personal conviction, pointing out that the Minnesota Center focused "not so much on religion as ethics," which is what it is chartered to do. No one at the center was trained in theology. Moreover, "the center had to be very careful about discussing religion—in part because religion has proved to be so divisive in the discussion of another medical issue, abortion."

At the other end of the table sat Tim McGuire, editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. His newspaper, he said, treats medical controversies such as cloning "as a scientific story with moral dimensions and concentrated on its moral rather than religious dimensions." But the paper also has a lively "Faith & Values" section, whose writers treat those religious dimensions. McGuire spoke to the need to include religious elements, arguing that omitting them and isolating the moral dimensions leaves the story "a little antiseptic." McGuire saw "the drawbacks to religion remaining in the background." But, like Kahn, he noted that the press tries to treat moral issues without taking sides: "you don't deal with it from the Catholic perspective, or the Jewish perspective, or the perspective of any other religion."

Kahn said that focusing on the moral dimensions "makes you listen to the arguments and take sides based on how the issue is presented, rather than taking a view because it is endorsed by a specific faith." Yet, he confessed, excluding religion and religious perspectives creates a false dichotomy. That's when he summed up the state of bioethics with his observation that "We're living in a schizophrenic way."

How, then, do those of us who try to treat and overcome the schizophrenia proceed? How do we argue for religion's place at the bioethics table? To use a religious term, we begin in repentance, acknowledging the sad fact that one fundamental understanding of religion's role is not to inform or provide perspective but to divide people, to heat up their arguments, to have them defend institutions and creeds instead of pursue truth.

Now, I hang out a good deal with religious bioethicists and theologians, and I have to say that the picture from Minneapolis, while a widespread one, is not fully accurate. Most theological ethicists—indeed, most religious people—are not barricaded behind dogmas, even though they do draw upon and are responsible to traditions and communities. Still, behind the stereotypes of the religious dogmatist, there are some realities to be faced.

Second, one addresses this issue by working to produce a level playing field between the secular and the religious; not only believers are sectarian and divisive. Have you ever heard arguments about anything worthwhile between Platonists and Aristotelians, idealists and pragmatists, situationists and absolutists? The press regularly has to cover conventions of anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and philosophical ethicists as if they were in battle zones between denominations, back when denominations actually fought each other. (Today, the consuming conflicts are within Catholicism, Islam, Presbyterianism, not among them.) Avoiding religion is not a way of avoiding divisive and often destructive conflict. And just as philosophy has healing and reconciling resources, so does religion.

That leaves, third, the most serious reason to include religion in bioethical discourse. It "thickens" the conversation, addressing as its spokespersons do, the reasons of the heart that reason does not know. At the same time, religion is not necessarily hostile to the force of reason, often welcoming it as a divine gift. But the religious voice, on cloning or abortion or any other issue, is grounded in many other resources as well: intuition, memory, tradition, community, experience, hope, and affection. To echo Kahn's phrase, it makes you listen.

The Socratic Dialogue, which took place in Minneapolis on April 28, 1998, was a collaboration between the Minnesota Public Radio Civic Journalism Initiative and the Public Religion Project.