Abstract
Alisha N. Mack and Charles C. Camosy,
Bioethics for Nurses: A Christian Moral Vision
(Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2022); 242 pp.: 9780802878922, $21.99 (pbk)
This book is written jointly by Alisha Mack, an Evangelical Christian nurse, and Charles Camosy, a Catholic Christian ethicist. The latter edited the excellent academic collection Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: beyond polarization (Cambridge University Press, 2012). This book is more practical in intention, addressed mainly to American nurses who identify as Christians. It is well written with plenty of, predominantly American, case studies, but it does assume that 80 per cent of the general public believes in God (unlike in the UK) and are, therefore, likely to accept broad Christian principles. Being written by a Catholic and an Evangelical, these principles are basically pro-life and against most abortions and any legalized form of euthanasia, including the use of life-shortening analgesics, although they do also commend broader principles of compassion, care and kindness that can, indeed, be affirmed by Christians of many different hues. Nurses who are mainstream Anglican or Reformed may feel excluded by the way this book repeatedly uses the phrase ‘the Christian nurse’.
Mary Dunn,
Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds
(Princeton NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022); 211 pp.: 9780691233222, $29.95/£25 (hbk)
Despite its populist title, this book is an academic engagement with seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century records written by Jesuit missionaries and others in French Canada, including an account of Canada’s first hospital, the hagiographic life of Catherine de Saint-Augustin, and tales of miraculous healings wrought by a dead Franciscan friar. The author is an associate professor of early modern Christianity at Saint Louis University who is concerned to promote a greater use of imagination and empathy within historical studies. So, she brings into her study her own experience of living with cancer and her daughter’s (unspecified) disability – depicting both as ‘embodied difference’ – and argues that embodied difference was often viewed by these Catholic missionaries as an opportunity for converting first-world Canadians (themselves tragically decimated by European diseases), for promoting prayer, and for canonizing Europeans such as Catherine and the Franciscan friar. She does not exactly champion the latter, but she does (sometimes confusingly) engage with them, while finally concluding that she will continue with chemotherapy for her own cancer treatment. Interesting, but heavy on analytical jargon.
Nicholas Holtam,
Sleepers Wake: Getting Serious About Climate Change
(London: SPCK, 2022); 123 pp.: 9780281086849, £10.99 (pbk)
This nicely illustrated and passionate book of meditations on the environment was written as the Archbishop of York’s Advent Book for 2022, but it will do just as nicely for advent 2023 as well. A short meditation on a variety of themes is given for each of the days of the four weeks of advent, with paintings by Rembrandt, Constable, Monet and others, and finishing on Christmas day with Crivelli’s sumptuous Madonna of the Candle. It is very accessible and reflects well Bishop Nicholas Holtam’s time spent championing environmental causes in the House of Lords until his retirement to Brighton (despite his mentioning, in passing, Constable’s hatred of the place) in 2021.
Critical Research on Religion
, Vol. 10, no. 2, August 2022
This special edition of the journal Critical Research on Religion results from a 2019 conference at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism at Uppsala University. In this conference: scholars, from around the world, came together to explore and discuss how racism and religion, historically and in the present, intermingle in different and complex ways. The aim was to understand how religion in its different constellations continues to produce and uphold, as well as counter, colonial structures, nationalism, and state racism. The aim was also to invite scholars to think about the role of religion, religious practices, and spiritualties within counter movements, such as indigenous rights movements. The goal of the conference was to create a platform for scholars interested in the intersections between racism and religion from which new interdisciplinary collaborations and projects could emanate to establish and further develop this research area, in both Sweden and internationally.
Hugh G. Gough Jr, Robert C. Newman and John A. Bloom, ‘Prophecy arguments in apostolic and contemporary times’,
Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
, Vol. 65, no. 1 (2022), pp. 37–46
This article in a very different journal, written by and for statistically minded evangelicals, provides a sharp contrast. The authors have assembled and analysed statistically a ‘Bible prophecy data set’, consisting of some 150 instances of Old Testament prophecy that were ‘fulfilled’ in the New Testament. They include, for example, Micah 5.2 – much used in churches over the Christmas period – being ‘fulfilled’ in Matthew’s birth narrative; they estimate the chance of that happening to be 1 in 200,000,000. Another candidate might be Psalm 22 – much used during Lent – being ‘fulfilled’ in the Gospel Passion narratives. The authors argue optimistically: ‘An immediate implication of a successful case for fulfilled Bible prophecy is that “God exists”, and hence atheism is false’ (p. 44). Those nurtured in critical exegetical scholarship are, though, unlikely to be convinced by this endeavour, regarding Old Testament prophecy as more about ‘forthtelling’ than ‘foretelling’ and, typically, considering New Testament narratives to have been ‘shaped’ rather than ‘fulfilled’ by Old Testament prophecy.