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A well-known and highly influential British bioethicist, Baroness Warnock, has gone beyond arguing for a patient’s “right to die” to suggesting that a patient has a “duty to die.” Specifically in the case of dementia, because of the drain on health care resources and the burden to family members and caregivers, she hopes that providers will be “licensed to put others down” if they are unable to look after themselves.

Warnock has been an outspoken advocate of euthanasia and has been very influential in encouraging embryonic stem cell research. This latest cause gives one reason to shudder. It is a frightening thought that some will have the authority to “put down” those who are judged to be a burden to society and family members. Of course, we’ve seen such logic before, most memborably, perhaps, in the Nazi extermination of those who were a drain on German society, the Jews.

Al Mohler has an insightful look at the issue here. Here are some of his comments:

Few issues throw the chasm between the Christian and secular understandings of humanity into such sharp focus. The biblical worldview begins with the premise that every single human being possesses full human dignity at every stage of life and development, simply because each human being is made in the image of God. Life is a divine gift to be celebrated and received under God’s own dominion. Human life is thus to be treasured and protected from conception until natural death.

The secular worldview, on the other hand, can see human beings as no more than highly-developed organisms in an accidental cosmos. Given that starting point, it is virtually inevitable that life will then be defined in terms of certain capacities or qualities that are more and less present in human beings. Thus, ethicists such as Peter Singer (and Baroness Warnock) start from the assumption that the ability to communicate and possess self-consciousness is necessary in order for an individual to be considered fully human — and thus to possess basic human rights.

Before long, the secular worldview devolves into a cost/benefit analysis. Some lives are simply more important and more valuable than others, this worldview implies. Like the medical motto taken up by Nazi Germany asserts, some people represent “life unworthy of life.” Baroness Mary Warnock now extends that argument to the mentally incapacitated.

This month’s free audiobook from Christian Audio is Charles M. Sheldon’s classic, In His Steps. In this 1896 work, he encourages believer’s to live in a Christ-like way. Long before the recent craze of WWJD paraphernalia, Sheldon asked, “What would Jesus Do?”

I just watched a hilarious Saturday Night Live clip featuring Tina Fey, former cast member, doing a remarkable job of impersonating Sarah Palin. You ought to watch it.

Christian Audio continues their generosity to the Christian reading public by providing this months free audiobook, The Confessions of Saint Augustine. There are no strings attached. The Confessions are considered to be the first Western autobiography written (around 397-398 A.D.) and has been very influential throughout church history. Augustine tells the story of his wayward youth and his conversion to Christianity.

Frank Turk has written a guest post on Between Two Worlds concerning the “dying” Christian bookstore. The Christian bookstore closest to our home has recently closed, at least anecdotally confirming the observation that these bookstores are in trouble. As I read Turk’s expanation of why this is happening, I found myself in agreement with many of his insights. Here is a pertinent excerpt, comparing the average Christian bookstore to Barnes & Nobles:

Listen: the fact that a CBA store cannot be seen as credible to the average customer unless it has one of those execrable plastic junk spinners — home of the plastic fish — should tell us something about why people shop there.

Let’s make a quick comparison: think about Barnes & Noble for a second. When you walk into B&N, what’s the first thing you see? You see books. Books are everywhere. I grant you that the first pile of books is usually closeouts, and the next pile of books is usually NYT best sellers at 30% off, but when you walk in, you see books. B&N is about books.

Now, why are they about books? Think about their annoying but usually-helpful staff for a second: you hate to ask any of them for help in spite of their usual helpfulness because they think they are very smart. B&N is all about books because books are for smart people. They employ people who think they are smart, and part of the thing going on there is that you could be more like them. So pay $5 for a coffee, full retail for all our books except the 25 titles on sale until they fall off the NYT best seller list, or maybe buy some of our phony “bargain” books which we publish ourselves in Asia to cut out the publisher and pretend we’re doing you a favor, and buy a discount card which you have to really, really use to get back, and voilà: you can be smart like us.

My experiences in most Christian bookstores have been in accordance with Turk’s description. One must wade through lots of fluff to arrive at anything of intellectual substance. Turk concludes:

I’m a Christian bookstore owner, and let me tell you something: the only bookstore I would miss if it closed would be mine — warts and all. We are hardly perfect, but we have striven over 5 years in business to show people that their faith can be more than a scripture on a mint. God forbid that our faith, and our choices to shore up our faith, are ever linked to the frivolous and the consumable. Our faith is not in something that moth and rust will devour, and if we have made it such a thing, may God have mercy on us.

I’ve been a resident of central Florida for over eight years now. I get tons of junk email (most of which I don’t even read, but a recent one caught my interest. I share a small portion of it that rings true to my ears.

You Know You’re A Floridian If…

Socks are only for bowlling.

You never use an umbrella because you know the rain will be over in five minutes.

You can tell the difference between fire ant bites and mosquito bites.

Anything under 70 degrees is chilly.

You have to drive north to get to The South.

Every other house in your neighborhood had blue roofs in 2004-2005.

You dread love bug season.

Down south means Key West.

Shoes are for business meetings and church… but you have worn fllip flops to church before.

A mountain is any hill 100 feet above sea level.

You’ve worn shorts and used the A/C on Christmas.

The inability to bear children has caused great pain to many married couples which wish to raise a family. The suffering of these couples must not be underestimated. Fortunately, modern medicine has devised a number of assisted reproductive technologies(ART) in order to help the plight of the infertile. Are these reproductive technologies acceptable for a Christian? What are the moral and ethical issues involved? It is these questions that I now consider.

But, I must first of all provide a glimpse into the technologies which are now available. There is a veritable alphabet soup of options. In ART, sexual intercourse is bypassed either by insemination or fertilization of the oocytes (eggs) in the laboratory (In vitro fertilization, IVF).

Artificial Insemination (AI) is when sperm is placed into the woman’s uterus or cervix using artificial means. An expansion of AI involves a sperm donor when the woman’s partner does not have functional sperm. Gamete intrafallopian transfer (GIFT) involves a mixture of eggs and sperm placed directly into a woman’s fallopian tubes using laparoscopy. This is usually preceded by a transvaginal ovum retrieval (OCR) in which a small needle is inserted into through the back of the vagina and guided by ultrasound into the ovarian follicles to collect eggs.

IVF is the technique of bringing about fertilization of the male and female gametes (sperm and eggs) outside the body. Fertility medications are often administered to the woman prior to IVF to stimulate the development of follicles in the ovary. IVF often involves one or more of the following techniques. OCR was explained in the previous paragraph. Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI), which is helpful when the male sperm counts are low, involves the injection of a single sperm into the center of an egg using a microneedle. Zygote intrafallopian transfer (ZIFT) involves the removal of eggs from the woman’s ovary, fertilization in the laboratory, and the placement of the resulting zygote into the fallopian tube.

Egg donors donate eggs when the mother is unable to produce or provide eggs due to a number of conditions. In this case, the eggs are removed from the donor, fertilized in the laboratory, with the embryos returned to the recipient’s uterus. Gestational carriers (or surrogates) are used when a woman’s medical condition prevents a safe pregnancy, if the woman has uterus, or if she is unable to carry a pregnancy to full term. Cryopreservation involves the freezing of eggs, sperm, or embryos for future use. Frozen embryos may be inserted in the body by the technique Frozen Embryo Transfer (EFT).

Next, some of the ethical implications of such technology.

Christian Audio offers a free audiobook each month. This month’s featured book Pilgrim’s Progress (10.5 hrs). The checkout code is JUN2008.

HT: Justin Taylor

War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life.” Life has never been normal…

What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent: 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased… Does it increase our chances of painful death? I doubt it… Does it decrease our chances of dying at peace with God? I cannot believe it. If active service does not persuade a man to prepare for death, what conceivable concatenation of circumstances would?

- C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, “Learning in War Time” (1939) pp. 21-22, 31

R. R. Reno reviews the Whitney Museum’s Biennial Exhibition of contemporary American art here at First Things. I must admit that I would be among Reno’s friends who would make “faces when I told them that I wanted to take a look.” I agree with Reno’s characterization of much of “contemporary art” as…

… a synonym for the radical chic that has become a cliché: chocolate-smeared performance artists, piles of trash in the corners of rooms, ideological pronouncements spray-painted onto police barriers, and so forth.

Most of Reno’s critique is not exactly glowing, yet he is fair and open-minded. His overall assessment of the exhibtion reminds me of Francis Schaeffer’s perceptive evaluation of art through the ages. There seems to be no overarching guiding philosophy behind contemporary American art. He states:

All the same, the message this year was clear: There is no settled orthodoxy in contemporary American art. There’s no there there.

Artists, as canaries in culture, provide insight into the moral and philosophical status of our modern culture. Forsaking the firm foundation of Christian Theism and realizing the inability of reason alone to provide meaning, humanity is left without meaning, direction, coherence, or cause. Reno concludes:

At this moment, the canaries at the Whitney testify to an emerging situation: creativity without a cause…Yet, as I walked on, my hope was mixed with anxiety. Culture cannot exist without orthodoxies, because freedom cannot give itself the obligations necessary for its own perfection: the ordered liberty of assent to that which is greater. Creative freedom we seem to have, but for what and toward what? The same question holds for intellectual, moral, and political freedom. It is one thing to be free from the false dogmas of the modern avant-garde; it is another to find the true dogmas that humanize. For the sake of our creative culture now freeing itself from the long reigning pieties of the modern avant-garde—and for our culture more broadly—I hope God sees fit to open some new eyes to see old truths.