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Assisted reproduction, with its test tubes, injections, and gamete donors, raises concerns about the nature of life and kinship. Yet these concerns do not take the same shape around the world. In this innovative ethnography of in vitro fertilization in Ecuador, Elizabeth F.S. Roberts explores how reproduction by way of biotechnological assistance is not only accepted but embraced despite widespread poverty and condemnation from the Catholic Church. Roberts' intimate portrait of IVF practitioners and their patients reveals how technological intervention is folded into an Andean understanding of reproduction as always assisted, whether through kin or God. She argues that the Ecuadorian incarnation of reproductive technology is less about a national desire for modernity than it is a product of colonial racial history, Catholic practice, and kinship configurations. God's Laboratory offers a grounded introduction to critical debates in medical anthropology and science studies, as well as a nuanced ethnography of the interplay between science, religion, race and history in the formation of Andean families.

By the time the Capuchins arrived in the seventeenth century, Kongo had been Catholic for nearly two hundred years. The European mission could not be conversion, then, but reinforcement; the Capuchins sought to establish the sacraments and a line to Rome in a lay-led church already suffused with an enduring, creative, and complex theological culture. In Memorializing the Unsung, Elochukwu Uzukwu uses the framework of this “ancient” Kongo Catholicism to explore European dependence on enslaved Kongo Catholics and the unconscionable Capuchin and Spiritan participation in the slave trade at large—a practice denounced by the lone voices of Capuchin Epifanio de Moirans and Spiritan Alexandre Monnet. Reconstructing the church that missionaries and Kongo Catholics built together on the foundations of local religion, Memorializing the Unsung contrasts the dignity denied the Kongo Catholics with the freedom they nonetheless performed. Uzukwu is particularly deft in tracing the agency of Kongo elites and laypeople from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth, carefully evaluating their deliberate engagements with southern Europeans, the role of the maestri (translator-catechists) in guiding the faithful, and the ultimate development of a unique theological vocabulary endorsed by the Kikongo catechism.Without the support and creativity of these unsung lay Catholics across west-central and eastern Africa, Uzukwu shows, the European missions in the region would have failed. Even while enslaved, the Kongo Slaves of the Church and the eastern African Slaves of the Mission served as mediators, co-creators, and reinventors of their world.

The article addresses the issue of the level of trust in the Catholic clergy in Poland among the youngest adult Catholics. The authors formulate their conclusions on the basis of a literature review and their own extensive research conducted among young adult Catholics born after 1995 (Generation Z). The research focused on the level of trust assessed with regard to the hierarchical division of the clergy in the Catholic Church as well as scandals involving priests exposed in recent years. The performed analyses took into account the level of religious commitment of young Catholics and their attitudes towards the role of the hierarchical Church in solving their problems. The research results indicate a significant level of trust in the Pope, a slightly lower level of trust in parish priests, and a very low level of trust in bishops and the institution of the Catholic Church in general. The decisive majority of those following religious observances and declaring compliance with the moral principles in line with Church teachings maintain trust in the institution of the Church. The final conclusions point to the need to manage the trust of the faithful as beneficiaries and clients of religious organisations such as the Church.

Vital Conflicts in Medical Ethics by renowned Swiss philosopher Martin Rhonheimer considers some of the most difficult and disputed questions in Catholic moral theology. With great rigor, he addresses classic dilemmas including the morality of the procedure known as craniotomy, and of various treatments for tubal pregnancy. Rhonheimer's approach, grounded in his retrieval of Thomistic virtue ethics, supports the encyclical Veritatis Splendor in showing how these cases can be resolved without recourse to the revisionist method of 'weighing goods'. The debate that \"\"Vital Conflicts\"\" addresses traces back to late-nineteenth century declarations of the Holy Office, which directed that Catholic institutions were prohibited from teaching that the craniotomy was a licit procedure; this teaching had restrictive implications for related cases. In this book, his newest work to be translated into English, Rhonheimer analyzes the morality of different procedures that might be employed in cases of 'vital conflict', where the life of the embryo or fetus cannot be saved, while that of the mother can be saved, but only through a procedure that traditional moral theory would judge to be a 'direct', and thus illicit, killing. These traditional conclusions, however, are not easily accepted because they contradict the basic principle of medical practice that requires physicians to save lives when possible. To resolve this aporia regarding cases of vital conflict, Rhonheimer clarifies fundamental aspects of moral theory, such as the meaning of the prohibition against killing, makes a case that prior analyses are unsatisfactory, and proposes his own solution.

The image of the “cafeteria Catholic”—one who blithely picks and chooses those doctrines that suit him—is a staple of American culture. But are American Catholics really so nonchalant about how they integrate the ancient devotional practices of Catholicism with the everyday struggles of the modern world? For this book 300 intensive interviews were conducted with members of six parishes to explore all aspects of this question. The book acts as an act of listening that allows ordinary Catholics to speak for themselves about how they understand their faith and how they draw upon it to find purpose in their lives. Many American Catholics, the book shows, do indeed have an uneasy relationship with the official teachings of the Church and struggle to live faithfully amidst the challenges of the modern world. But the book finds that it is a genuine struggle, one that reveals a dynamic and self-aware relationship to the Church's teachings.

What, exactly, does it mean to be human? It is an age-old question, one for which theology, philosophy, science, and medicine have all provided different answers. But though a unified response to the question can no longer be taken for granted, how we answer it frames the wide range of different norms, principles, values, and intuitions that characterize today's bioethical discussions. If we don't know what it means to be human, how can we judge whether biomedical sciences threaten or enhance our humanity? This fundamental question, however, receives little attention in the study of bioethics. In a field consumed with the promises and perils of new medical discoveries, emerging technologies, and unprecedented social change, current conversations about bioethics focus primarily on questions of harm and benefit, patient autonomy, and equality of health care distribution. Prevailing models of medical ethics emphasize human capacity for self-control and self-determination, rarely considering such inescapable dimensions of the human condition as disability, loss, and suffering, community and dignity, all of which make it difficult for us to be truly independent. InHealth and Human Flourishing, contributors from a wide range of disciplines mine the intersection of the secular and the religious, the medical and the moral, to unearth the ethical and clinical implications of these facets of human existence. Their aim is a richer bioethics, one that takes into account the roles of vulnerability, dignity, integrity, and relationality in human affliction as well as human thriving. Including an examination of how a theological anthropology-a theological understanding of what it means to be a human being-can help us better understand health care, social policy, and science, this thought-provoking anthology will inspire much-needed conversation among philosophers, theologians, and health care professionals.

Hidden--Richard Giannone's searingly honest, richly insightful memoir-eloquently captures the author's transformation from a solitary gay academic to a dedicated caregiver as well as a sexually and spiritually committed man. Always alone, always fearful, he initially resisted the duty to look after his dying female relatives. But his mother's fall into dementia changed all that. Her vulnerability opened this middle-aged man to the love of another man, a former priest and Jersey boy like himself. Together the two men saw the old woman to her death and did the same for Giannone's sister. In Hidden Giannone uncovers how, ultimately, these experiences moved him closer to participating in the vitality he believed pulsed in the world but had always eluded him. The mothering life of this gay partnership evolved alongside the AIDS crisis and within and against Italian American culture that reflected the Catholic Church's discountenancing of homosexual love. Giannone vividly weaves his reflections on gay life in Greenwich Village and his spiritual journey as a gay man and Catholic into his experience of caring for the women of his family. In Hidden Giannone recounts a gripping religious conversion, drawing on the wisdom of the ancient desert mothers and fathers of Egypt and Palestine. Because he was raised a Catholic, the shift is not from nothing to something. Rather, it is away from the modeling power of institutional Christianity to the tempering influence of homosexuality on the Gospel. Gay or straight, so long as we remain hidden from ourselves, the true God remains hidden from us.

By the time the Capuchins arrived in the seventeenth century, Kongo had been Catholic for nearly two hundred years. The European mission could not be conversion, then, but reinforcement; the Capuchins sought to establish the sacraments and a line to Rome in a lay-led church already suffused with an enduring, creative, and complex theological culture. In Memorializing the Unsung , Elochukwu Uzukwu uses the framework of this \"ancient\" Kongo Catholicism to explore European dependence on enslaved Kongo Catholics and the unconscionable Capuchin and Spiritan participation in the slave trade at large-a practice denounced by the lone voices of Capuchin Epifanio de Moirans and Spiritan Alexandre Monnet. Reconstructing the church that missionaries and Kongo Catholics built together on the foundations of local religion, Memorializing the Unsung contrasts the dignity denied the Kongo Catholics with the freedom they nonetheless performed. Uzukwu is particularly deft in tracing the agency of Kongo elites and laypeople from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth, carefully evaluating their deliberate engagements with southern Europeans, the role of the maestri (translator-catechists) in guiding the faithful, and the ultimate development of a unique theological vocabulary endorsed by the Kikongo catechism. Even while enslaved, Uzukwu argues, the Kongo people served as mediators, co-creators, and reinventors of their world, and without their support, the European missions in the region would have failed. A cutting-edge contribution to the political history of Catholicism in Africa, Memorializing the Unsung offers concrete advantages to researchers in a wide variety of fields.

At the microlevel, this paper focuses on the Roman Catholic cult of the Sacred Heart, noting its spread among Catholic populations in Central Europe whose liturgical tradition is that of Byzantium rather than Rome. At the mesolevel, it places this instance of religious acculturation in the context of long-term economic and political inequalities between East and West. At the macrolevel, implications are outlined for debates concerning civilizational differences and modernity. It is commonly supposed that the latter was initiated when Protestants began a shift toward interior belief based on text, eventually dragging Roman Catholics in their wake, while Eastern Christians have remained largely excluded from both material and ontological progress. The anthropology of Christianity has concentrated on Western-influenced “moderns,” in their many guises, outside the religion’s heartlands. But the take-up of Sacred Heart religiosity among the Greek Catholics of Central Europe suggests that there are no deep ontological barriers within Christianity. Similarly, there are no grounds for dismissing Eastern Christian institutional patterns as premodern; they should be drawn into the comparative framework as a distinctive crystallization of Christian civilization.