This past week one of my students in Christian ethics class at Southern Seminary asked for a list of recommended books on bioethics (that is, issues related to such things as in vitro fertilization, cloning, embryonic stem cell research, nanotechnology). The students had read Bill McKibben’s Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age and this young minister wanted some other reading on such matters. So here’s some of my favorite books on the topic, in no particular order (and without, of course, a blanket endorsement of everything articulated in any of them).
Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
Wendell Berry, What Are People For?: Essays
Gilbert C. Meilaender, Body, Soul, and Bioethics
Gilbert C. Meilaender, Bioethics: A Primer for Christians
Oliver O’Donovan, Begotten or Made?: Human Procreation and Medical Technique
Leon Kass, Human Cloning and Human Dignity: The Report of the President’s Council on Bioethics
Leon R. Kass, Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics
Robert P. George, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life
Patrick Lee and Robert P. George, Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics
There are many others, but that’s just a sampling. I agree with Leon Kass that one of the most important ways to understand the human dignity issues raised by bioethical questions is by reading some good fiction and poetry. Literature probes at the core of what it means to be human far more extensively than ethics or philosophy ever can.
