My friend Sarah recently presented at the Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity’s Global Bioethics: Emerging Challenges Facing Human Dignity conference. Her presentation was entitled “Women’s Discipleship: A Pathway for Bioethics in the Local Church,” and is available on her website, Women of Faith in Culture.

Walker Percy received the Laetare Medal at Notre Dame in 1989, and in his acceptance speech he said:

The motto of the Laetare Medal is, I understand, ‘Magna est veritas et prevalebit,’ ‘Truth is mighty and shall prevail.’ I like to think that it applies even to the humble vocation of a novelist.

In my last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, I tried to show how, while truth should prevail, it is a disaster when only one kind of truth prevails at the expense of another. If only one kind of truth prevails, the abstract and technical truth of science, then nothing stands in the way of a demeaning of and a destruction of human life for what would appear to be reasonable short-term goals.

It’s no accident that I think that German science, as great as it was, ended in the destruction of the Holocaust.

The novelist likes to irritate people by pointing this out. It’s his pleasure and vocation to reveal, with his own elusive and indirect way, man’s need of and openings to other than scientific propositions.

The novelist, I think, has a special calling to truth these days. The world into which you are graduating is a deranged world. It is his task to show the derangement.

This is a much needed perspective in current conversations regarding ethics and (or vs.) science.

Percy’s entire speech is available on YouTube.

HT: First Things

Another link from Christianity Today: Sci-Fi’s Brave New World: How the genre draws us to its own views of redemption

Which stories will guide us as we make our way through the perilous 21st century with its stunning technologies and burgeoning data about our bodies, minds, and universe? As science holds out to us possibilities previously only imagined, which myths will shape the imaginations of our decision makers? Which narratives will form our religious sensibilities, provide our spiritual values, and craft our view of the supernatural—indeed, of God? Only the true myth at the heart of Christianity is powerful enough to prevent excesses and avert atrocities. How can the church respond?

Read the whole thing

I’ll just say that I find this very convicting.

We need to hear competing voices of information from the world around us, use our time in the digital world wisely, and learn to shut that world down when it becomes more important to get up in the morning and answer emails than it does to get up and read the Bible and pray.

A helpful reminder from Dr. Carson. Read the whole thing.

Read it again.

The New Media Frontier has been nominated for Outreach Resource of the Year in Evangelism by Outreach magazine.

Here’s one of the classes listed for this Fall at church:

The Office, Lost, The Sopranos and the Old Testament: An ardent introduction to the Old Testament with an exploration of how society’s images and culture shape our understanding of the characters, stories and books of the Old Testament. This won’t be boring. Taught by Jeff Tabares. Class meets Sundays in the Music Room of the Education Building at 10:45 am.

Anyone in the Chicago area interested in attending, it’s Covenant Presbyterian (in Bucktown).

Coinciding with the 200th anniversary of the British Parliament’s passage of a bill banning the transportation of slaves (February 23, 2007), the movie Amazing Grace brought to the big screen the life of William Wilberforce, a key figure in the British abolition movement. Wilberforce’s life and work have lessons for us as we engage culture and work to uphold human dignity amidst the bioethical challenges of our day.

Official Movie Site
CT Special Section on Amazing Grace

BBC History on William Wilberforce