Gilbert Meilaender

What is distinctively Lutheran is to think of ourselves first as catholic—as catholics who found at a certain point in history that they needed to reform the . . . . Continue Reading »

Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village by Juliet du Boulay Denise Harvey, 462 pages, $45 In 1974 Juliet du Boulay pub-lished Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village , an ethnographic study of the Greek mountain vil-lage, Ambeli, whose inhabitants’ manner of subsistent living was . . . . Continue Reading »

Gilbert Meilaender writes a letter to his old friend Stanley Hauerwas . Dear Stan, I read your memoir, Hannah’s Child , with pleasure and had the sense that you must have taken pleasure in writing it. I started it on a Saturday and finished it before the weekend was over, so you know it . . . . Continue Reading »

To live or to die? When the time comes, Gilbert Meilaender wants his fate in his family’s hands, not his own. From the October 1991 issue. Recently I was a speaker and panel member at a small educational workshop on “advance directives” sponsored by the ethics committee of our local hospital. . . . . Continue Reading »

A Brief Inquiry Into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, With “On My Religion” by John Rawls Harvard, 275 pages, $27.95 To read A Brief Inquiry is to be led to ponder whether, as Wordsworth wrote, the child is father of the man. For the book makes available a text that was not generally known to . . . . Continue Reading »

Dear Hannah, I know you saw the news almost a year ago about the successful cloning of human embryos by a company in California. I’m pretty sure we talked about it at the time. Unlike the claims a few years ago by Korean researchers, which turned out to be fraudulent, this one seems genuine. . . . . Continue Reading »

Here is Stanley Fish, writing Save the World on Your Own Time: “Not only is the genuinely academic classroom full of passion and commitment; it is more interesting than the alternative. The really dull classroom would be the one in which a bunch of nineteen- or twenty-year-olds debate . . . . Continue Reading »

In The Patient as Person , published almost forty years ago, when transplantation technology was still in its early stages, Paul Ramsey considered different ways of procuring organs for transplant. One might invite people to “opt in,” to donate organs to be used after their death (or, in . . . . Continue Reading »

Nothing is more common in life than a seeming tension between the freedom of individuals and the authority of communities and their designated leaders. From individual citizens who must set aside their own desires and obey laws they think unwise, to athletes who must subordinate their individual . . . . Continue Reading »

Persons: The Difference Between “Someone”?and “Something” by Robert Spaemann Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $85 WE SOMETIMES encounter questions that are both philosophically puzzling and practically significant. The temptation then is to bypass the philosophical puzzles . . . . Continue Reading »