Christian Bioethics A Guide for the Perplexed

From Triple Helix - Christmas 2009 : (p20)

Written by Helen Barratt

• T&T Clark 2008
• £14.99
• Pb 180pp
• ISBN 978 0 56703 197 6

Christian bioethics growever more complex as technologies develop and new issues emerge. AgnetaSutton has set out to make some of the themes more accessible. She takes a broad sweep, encompassing traditional challenges such as euthanasia and IVF, as well as more novel topics like our roleas guardians of creation and how we should treat animals, not addressed in other books.

The book is well referenced and draws widely on a variety of predominantly Catholic texts tosupport and explain her argument. However, this is perhaps a book for those who already have some knowledge of the discipline, rather than readers looking for an introduction. For example, on the beginning of life, Sutton starts from the premise that human life begins at the point of fertilisation. She thus seeks to critique arguments in favour of life beginning at another point in development, for example implantation. Sadly, arguments around life beginning at fertilisation are not considered in real depth.

This book sits alongside othersthat seek to make bioethics more accessible to a wider Christian readership, and its breadth in terms of subject material and external references is its mainstrength.

• managing money - back to biblical basics
• Assisted suicide DPP guidelines currently cause concern
• climate change, population and health - The problem is consumption, not numbers
• Fatal distraction
• medical miracles - doctors, saints and healing in the modern world
• Abortion and mental health
• God or money?
• contracts, compacts and covenants
• junior doctors on the frontline
• MDG4 - a world of difference for child health
• treasures of the darkness
• Joanna Thompson, 1949-2009
• jian hua - build China
• cmf's ambassadors to a needy world
• eutychus
• Too much, too soon - the Government's plans for your child's sex education
• Christian Bioethics A Guide for the Perplexed
• Just sex - is it ever just sex?
• bioethics at the movies
• Impressions from the Psalms
• Embryo - a defense of human life
• Health for Life - the pathway to biblical health and wholeness
• Adoption
• Assisted suicide
• rear view mirrow