Medicine, ethics, and theology embrace various ideas and concepts regarding human suffering - ranging from pain, suffering from loneliness, a lack of meaning or finitude, to a religious understanding of suffering, grounded in a suffering and compassionate God. In the practices of clinical medical ethics and health care chaplaincy, these diverse concepts overlap. What kind of conflicts arise from different concepts in patient care and counseling, and how should they be dealt with in a reflective way? Fostering international interdisciplinary scientific conversations, the book aims to deepen the discussion in medical ethics concerning the understanding of suffering, and the caring and counseling of patients.

This work examines contemporary views on medical ethics, such as preventing death, defining family relations, and reproductive and disabled issues.

"Suffering is an unavoidable reality in health care. Not only are patients and families suffering but also the clinicians who care for them. Commonly the suffering experienced by clinicians is moral in nature, reflecting the increasing complexity of health care, their roles within it, and the expanding range of available interventions. Moral suffering is the anguish experienced in response to various forms of moral adversity including moral harms, wrongs or failures, or unrelieved moral stress. Confronting moral adversity challenges clinicians' integrity: the inner harmony that arises when their essential values and commitments are aligned with their choices and actions. The most studied response to moral adversity is moral distress. The sources and sequelae of moral distress, one type of moral suffering, have been documented among clinicians across specialties. Recent interest has expanded to include a more corrosive form of moral suffering, moral injury. Moral resilience, the capacity to restore or sustain integrity in response to moral adversity, offers a path designing individual and system solutions to address moral suffering. It encompasses capacities aimed at developing self- regulation and self-awareness, buoyancy, moral efficacy, self-stewardship and ultimately personal and relational integrity. Moral resilience has been shown to be a protective resource that reduces the detrimental impact of moral suffering. Clinicians and healthcare organizations must work together to transform moral suffering by cultivating the individual capacities for moral resilience and designing a new architecture to support ethical practice. Used worldwide for scalable and sustainable change, the Conscious Full Spectrum Response, offers a method to solve problems to support integrity, shift patterns that undermine moral resilience and ethical practice, and source the inner potential of clinicians and leaders to produce meaningful and sustainable results that benefit all"--

In this profoundly theological reflection on illness, healing, and the doctor-patient relationship, pediatrician Margaret Mohrmann bridges the sometimes disparate worlds of medicine and faith, of high technology and ultimate concern. Drawing on her two decades of experience treating children who suffer from disease and dysfunction, Mohrmann movingly reveals the temptations of idolatry that beset our understanding of health and life, the intrinsic connectedness underlying all medical encounters, and the difficulties and riches of using scripture as a moral resource. In clear, accessible language Mohrmann emphasizes the importance of interpreting the lives of the suffering as meaningful and ongoing stories - stories that require all of us to respond in healing ways. Uncovering insights from such diverse sources as the apostle Paul, Alasdair MacIntyre and Flannery O'Connor, she suggests that what is required for a truly human life is not the absence of pain, but the presence of others. Both pastoral and prophetic, Medicine as Ministry is a challenge to rethink the purposes of health care - and to better discern the human condition.

Contemporary discourse in biomedical ethics has been greatly shaped, sustained and enriched through the insights and perspectives offered by its theologian-contributors. This volume examines the work of four Christian theologians who have significantly influenced the field of bioethics in the U.S.: Richard McCormick, SJ; Paul Ramsey; Stanley Hauerwas; and James M. Gustafson. Each theorist's writings are explored in turn, in order to elucidate, compare and contrast their foundational theological premises, their particular approaches to moral reasoning, and their considered responses to selected medico-moral issues. The final chapter reflects some of the author's own critical responses in dialogue with the study's four subjects, and offers general suggestions about the moral perspective afforded by Christian theology. This volume should be of interest both to those seeking a fuller understanding of contemporary discussions in bioethics and to those studying Christian ethics in the modern era.

Modern medicine has unprecedented power to heal human beings of physical and mental disease, to keep them health, and even to improve the human race. This power can be used to humanize life or to dehumanize and destroy it. It can be used justly to benefit all, or it can be used to benefit the few at the expense of the many. How to use such power is a question of values and, therefore, of individual and group decisions which are not merely technical but ethical. Two reasons have induced us to add to the already extensive literature on medical-ethical and bioethical topics. First, too much of this literature focuses on a few controversial but sometimes minor topics, while neglecting the broader and major issues affecting human health and the health care professions. Second, we want to assist Christian, and especially Catholic, health care professionals and health care facilities faced with the difficult and often puzzling responsibility of giving witness to a long tradition of humanistic health care, while working with other professionals and government agencies committed to diverse value systems. -from Introduction.

What are humans to do--and how should caregivers respond--when faced with the reality of anguish? The Roots of Sorrow addresses the sometimes painful questions that surround human suffering. By integrating concrete examples with personal stories of adversity and sorrow, Phil Zylla constructs a pastoral theology that situates itself within the very core of suffering. Resisting the natural tendency to flee from the pain of sorrow, Zylla empowers professionals to help others face suffering directly and honestly.

Long before it cured disease, medicine aimed to relieve suffering-but despite that precedence, the relief of suffering often takes a back seat in today's biomedical research and treatment. Modern bioethics, too, has been slow to come to terms with suffering. Attention to ethical quandaries has sometimes displaced attention to the experience of patients. This book seeks to place suffering at the center of bioethical thinking once again. Among the questions its contributors explore are: What is the meaning of suffering? How does it relate to pain? If there can be pain without suffering, can there be suffering without pain? Does suffering require advanced cognitive abilities? Can animals suffer? Many believe that we have strong obligations to relieve or minimize suffering; what are the limits of these obligations? Does the relief of suffering justify the termination of a patient's life, as proponents of euthanasia maintain? What is the bearing of suffering on the cherished bioethical principle of autonomy? Can suffering impair a patient's ability to make reasoned choices? To what extent must the encounter with suffering be an important component of medical education? Do religious traditions ever move from efforts to explain and relieve suffering to positions that justify and promote it? The aim of this book is to undertake a new foray into this "foreign territory" of suffering. With a foreword by the distinguished bioethicist Daniel Callahan, its twenty-two chapters, authored by leading scholars in science and bioethics, are organized so as to examine suffering in its biological, psychological, clinical, religious, and ethical dimensions.

In Truthfulness and Tragedy Stanley Hauerwas provides an account of moral existence and ethical rationality that shows how Christian convictions operate, or should operate, to form and direct lives. In attempting to conceptualize the basis of Christian ethics in a manner that will render Christian convictions morally intelligible, the author casts fresh light on traditional theoretical issues and articulates the distinctive Christian response to contemporary concerns such as suicide, medical ethics, and child care. The first section of the book deals with methodological issues: the meaning and nature of practical reason, obligation claims, natural law, and self deception, and the affinity of story and ethics. It focuses on the relation of truthfulness and tragedy and the need for a story--a set of religious convictions or "grammar of theology"--that does justice to the tragic character of human existence. The second section addresses substantive issues: suicide, euthanasia, and the value of survival; the moral limits of population growth; the definition of "person" for medical reasons; and social involvement and Christian ethics. The overall theme is the need for a community in which truthfulness is a way of life. In the final section, devoted to the problem of how to care for retarded children, the implications of the author's ethical position are given concrete expression. He discusses the assumptions underlying the willingness to have children, criteria for humanness, medical ethics, and how truthful communities deal with suffering. In Truthfulness and Tragedy Stanley Hauerwas extends and clarifies the ethical position set forth in his earlier books Character and the Christian Life and Vision and Virtue. He is associate professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. He was a senior fellow in Christian medical ethics at the Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute for the Study of Reproduction and Bioethics, and taught medical ethics at the University of Texas medical branch in Galveston.