Jeffrey Bishop

Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. (Foucault, 1984, 85)In this essay, I take a note from Michel Foucault regarding the notion of biopolitics. For Foucault, biopolitics has both repressive and constitutive properties. Foucault's claim is that with the rise of modern government, the state became exceedingly concerned about the body politic, the bodies that make up the polis, including the health of those bodies. However, Giorgio Agamben claims that Foucault and all western political philosophy misses the relationship between power and Sovereignty, with disastrous results and totalizing tendencies. I explore the case of Terri Schiavo claiming that the social conservatives have attempted to politicize bare life in its legal maneuverings, but I also show how the social liberals open an uncontrollable space between life and death. Both the left and the right miss the aporia at the heart of western political philosophy, and bioethics is complicit in the totalizing effects of contemporary medicine.

With the increased costs of health care, hospitals have put increased pressure on chaplains to show efficiency and effectiveness. In addition, with the drive of evidence-based medicine, new techniques of spiritual assessment are being created, allowing chaplains to demonstrate their effectiveness. In this paper, I demonstrate the circular nature of the construction of these tools of spiritual assessment and argue that they are created in the image and likeness of generic chaplaincy. I also demonstrate how these tools come to direct spiritual therapy. However, these spiritual assessments and therapies are idols and ersatz liturgies directed at medical rather than spiritual ends. I conclude with a reflection on Jean-Luc Marion’s distinction between idol and icon, and argue that only the true Liturgy of the Church can deliver true grace, true spiritual therapy.

This issue of Christian Bioethics brings together essays that offer theological responses to the final question of The Anticipatory Corpse: “Might it not be that only theology can save medicine?” (Bishop 2011, 313). In this essay, I begin to spell out what I had in mind when I asked that final question. For Christians, the right way to comport oneself to others—the right orientation—grows out of Divine Liturgy. This is theology in the most practical of senses. Liturgy is a set of practices, of rituals, that bring people into right relationship with one another. Liturgy tells us that its participants cannot give an account of their own existence, and it tells us that other human animals are not resources to be controlled, or bodies to be overpowered by technology or by their own wills. Thus, with Evagrius Ponticus, we can say that the theologian is the one who prays. It is primarily those faithful people who, by virtue of their faithfulness, understand how they are to comport themselves to others, because they are oriented to the Divine. It is through these Holy people that theology might save medicine.