Conversations around intellectual disability and sin often rest on either the structural level, or culpability for specific actions. Yet, the effects of sin in the world cannot be reduced to culpability, especially in light of the far-reaching impact of structural sin. Using ethnographic fieldwork among adults with intellectual disabilities, I illustrate how people with IDD participate in structural and interpersonal sin alike, particularly how they resist sin through the exertion of complex agencies. Through the thick description of fieldwork, we gain better tools for recognizing the full, complex humanity of people with IDD—not dismissing them as either sinners or saints—while also recognizing all persons’ call to resist structural sin.

This essay draws on the work of Johann Baptist Metz to reimagine a Christian Bioethics that develops from the place of suffering. Beginning from the place of suffering resists the future offered within the scientific-technological paradigm. In turning to Metz, Christian bioethics should give greater attention to complex social structures that contribute to injustices and inequalities resulting in health disparities and unnecessary deaths.

This article engages the debate around embodiment in the resurrected life, drawing from sources in disability theology, black theology, and womanist ethics. Do we retain “body marks,” as M. Shawn Copeland calls them in her consideration of the scars and wounds on black bodies? Or, as Nancy Eiesland and Amos Yong discuss it: do we retain our impairments as Christ did after his resurrection? I will describe the debate, highlight concern over continuity of identity, and use J. Kameron Carter’s work on theology and race to propose an alternative approach.

In Christian bioethics, the call for a greater integration of social ethics and medical ethics is a popular refrain, yet lasting progress toward this goal has been elusive, in part due to the traditional emphasis on quandary cases in medical ethics. This article develops an alternative approach to moral discernment in health care, employing a theological interpretation of solidarity to promote greater social consciousness in ordinary health care decision making. This shifts the ethical analysis from abstract scenarios to everyday choices, elevating the moral significance of seemingly mundane concerns like antibiotic use and diet and exercise.

In the opinion of many, medical assistance in dying is advocated primarily by secular thinkers whereas Christians seem to be more skeptical. However, we conclude that Dutch euthanasia practice, the most liberal in the world, would not have been possible without the support of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands. We examine four sources that illustrate the nature and extent of that support: national surveys from 1970–2018, official church reports from 1972–2003, contributions to the public debate in the formative 1970s and 1980s made by protestant theologians and physicians, and a recent survey amongst Reformed pastors regarding their experiences with a parishioner’s euthanasia request. In the form of seven characteristics of Dutch Calvinism we explore the reasons for this early advocacy and try to understand why this support seems to be fading since the turn of the century.

This article argues that Catholic health care facilities should resist the emerging consensus in clinical ethics, which contends that patients suffering from intravenous drug use induced endocarditis should be denied multiple heart valve replacements. The article demonstrates that the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, as well as core concepts in the Christian moral tradition, such as human dignity, the preferential option for the poor, and the common good, reject this emerging consensus. Patients suffering from endocarditis who inject drugs should, in principle, be eligible for second, third, and even fourth valve replacements. While hospitals may protect and promote the common good by limiting access to multiple heart valve surgeries for this patient population, these limitations should emerge from evidence that such surgeries harm the common good of access to primary health care for all members of a community.