Eric Cohen

As a longtime student of and ­occasional contributor to First Things , I am of course ­sympathetic to the general persuasion of R. R. Reno’s reflections: the desire to defend virtue against vice in modern culture, and to promote the good and hopeful society against narcissism, secular . . . . Continue Reading »

War and the American Difference: Theological Reflections on Violence and National Identity ? by Stanley Hauerwas Baker Academic, 224 pages, $19.99 It is hard to think about the future of warfare without being terrified. The new weapons of war—nuclear, chemical, biological—will only get . . . . Continue Reading »

Whatever happened to bioethics? The decade between the cloning of Dolly the sheep and the election of Barack Obama was rife with heated public arguments about embryo research, cloning, assisted reproduction, and other matters bioethical. President George W. Bush’s first prime-time speech was . . . . Continue Reading »

On the cover of Being Human, the anthology of writings collected by the President’s Council on Bioethics under Leon Kass’s stewardship, there is a picture of a ballerina leaping into the air, body extended, gazing and reaching and soaring toward the heavens, looking at once perfectly natural . . . . Continue Reading »

Whenever I meet with scientists, I’m always struck by their optimism—and their discontent. Mostly they are optimists, excited by the latest findings: the newly isolated gene variant that may help explain schizophrenia, the new telescopic images that reveal the violent births of distant . . . . Continue Reading »

“Orphan” is one of those words that seems old-fashioned to modern ears”a word that evokes abject poverty in a Dickens novel. But in the years ahead, our reproductive technologies may lead us down a new, terrible path of creating orphans by design. In this case, the problem is not . . . . Continue Reading »

The term “Judeo-Christian” has entered our civic vocabulary for good reason. On many of the deepest issues of human life”the meaning of sex, the dignity of the family, the creation of human beings”Jews and Christians stand together against the secular image of man. But . . . . Continue Reading »

Human Dignity in the Biotech Century: A Christian Vision for Public Policy edited by Chrles W. Colson and Nigel M. De S. Cameron Intervarsity. 252 pp. $14 paper In Human Dignity in the Biotech Century: A Christian Vision for Public Policy , some of the most active voices in the American bioethics . . . . Continue Reading »