Emerging technologies continue to raise some of the most important questions in bioethics - around life and death, what it means to be human, and what it means to truly care for other humans. Papers in this session will address various aspects of intersections between biomedical technology and religious perspectives: genetic testing, AI and organoid intelligence, and life-sustaining technologies and risky truth-telling that a patient is going to die. The speakers will present various genealogies, perspectives, and areas of professional practice in their reflections on some of the most pressing bioethical questions.
Modern medicine often obscures death, sustaining life at all costs and rendering mortality a choice. This paper examines two challenges Christian nurses face in caring for the dying: medicine’s obfuscation of death (Kaufman, Weber) and the hierarchy that disqualifies nursing knowledge (Foucault). Nursing traditional response in patient advocacy assumes patients can self-determine their best interests, yet institutional truths shape what patients can recognize as their own. Instead, this paper proposes parrhesia—courageous truth-telling—as a faithful nursing response. Drawing from Foucault’s late work on parrhesia and Christian asceticism, the nurse parrhesiast humbly critiques medicine’s denial of death, bearing witness to life’s finitude. By speaking truthfully despite personal risk, the nurse parrhesiast disrupts institutional silence around mortality, restoring honesty and compassion to end-of-life care.
By revealing previously unimaginable knowledge about human bodies, genetic testing and data collection hold the potential to fall into a certain pattern of medicine that views patients as objects to control, resulting in an isolating approach to healthcare. This is a particularly harmful problem for already marginalized groups like those living with disabilities and communities of color. Christian anthropology’s understanding of the human person as relational, dependent, and creative illuminates an alternative framework for the purpose and employment of genetic testing. In particular, Alejandro García-Rivera’s imaginary of the garden illuminates a way that genetic technology can be limited according to human frailty and directed towards a flourishing rooted in the interdependent nature of human life. In short, genetic technology should be employed according to a view of human persons as interdependent, fragile, and relational to serve individual and collective flourishing rather than serve as isolating and controlling.
“Organoid intelligence” (OI) is an emerging field that aims to leverage the processing power of the human brain, which has been shown to match supercomputer processing at a tiny fraction of the energy requirement. OI builds upon recent developments in brain organoids that promise to replicate aspects of learning and memory and possibly aspects of cognition in vitro. Brain organoids are networked together to form a biological computer. This paper argues that the idealization of the human brain as a computer already de-humanizes us. To this end, this paper offers a genealogy of cognitive science and its resultant disappearance of the human in two parts: (1) the spatialization of the mind, and (2) the cybernetic mechanization of the mind as computer. The resulting cognitive science and neuroscience simply assume the mind as a computer and an ersatz incarnation of a dataist metaphysics.