“Did God Forbid Brain Transplants?” Comment Magazine (August 2025)

Several months ago I attended a lecture at Yale’s School of Medicine by the director of the most prominent bioethics centre in the world. Speaking about the future of bioethics, she listed some of the emerging topics in the field. When she mentioned “bioethics and religion,” she paused and vocalized the audience’s incredulity: “Yes, I know what you’re thinking: What could religion ever have to do with bioethics? It turns out, quite a bit!” As she chuckled at her own surprise at this revelation, another senior Yale ethics professor and friend of mine, seated next to me, whispered under her breath, “How quickly they forget.” What the speaker (and perhaps the audience) had forgotten is how intertwined bioethics and Christian theology were at the discipline’s inception.

Read the whole essay here.