Body of Compassion or Stories of Family Caregiving

Body of Compassion: Ethics, Medicine, and the Church

Author: Joel James Shuman

In The Body of Compassion, Joel Shuman presents new theological treatment of contemporary bioethics, weaving together personal experience, a critical treatise on bioethics, and an exploration of a Christian theological alternative. This book is sure to be of interest to ethicists, medical professionals, and everyone who is troubled by the conflicts between science and religion.

Library Journal

Religion and ethics instructor Shuman's first book is the latest entry in Westview's ever-intriguing "Radical Traditions" series. Using examples from literature and personal experience, Shuman constructs an interesting case for the primacy of compassion--Christian compassion--in the delivery of healthcare. The standard of moral rectitude he sets for caregivers may seem impossibly high, but his work will be instructive and provocative for many readers. For most collections. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

Shuman (theological ethics, Duke U.) weaves personal experience, contemporary bioethics, and a Christian theological alternative into his treatment. Taking his grandfather's lonely end in a sterile hospital as a goad, he explores how modern medicine has distanced itself from people as living being. He also explores various approaches to bioethics of the past 20 years and finds that each has failed due to the lack of a theological concern for the body that places it in a larger context. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	List of Credits
	Introduction
1	Before Bioethics: The Moral Paradox of Modern Medicine	1
2	The "Birth" of Bioethics: Scientific Expertise and the Justification of the Modern Project	47
3	After Bioethics: Toward a Christian Theology of the Body and Its Goods	79
4	Beyond Bioethics: Caring for Christ's Body	113
	Afterword: Awaiting the Redemption of Our Body - Life and Death in the Meantime	157
	Notes	161
	Bibliography	201
	Index	209

See also: Connaissances Interpersonnelles dans les Organisations

Stories of Family Caregiving: Reconsiderations of Theory, Literature, and Life

Author: Poirier and Ayres

This interdisciplinary book explores the experiences of women and men who provide long-term, life-sustaining care to family members. Family caregiving has historically been perceived as the overwhelming and frequently onerous duty of beleaguered and/or saintly women. Although this portrait may apply to some situations, overall this predominately upper middle-class, white image of the "angel in the house" is limited and dangerously stereotypical. This book brings a narrative approach to the subject through stories from fiction and autobiography and from interviews with the family caregivers that explore their experiences in all their contradictions, hopes, and fears. The authors examine the narratives of family caregiving, as related in literary accounts and interviews, and the theories of care in feminism and nursing. They also consider the foundations on which these theories rest and challenge health professionals to think contextually about both theories and stories.