ABSTRACT
The problem of translating religious discourse into a common bioethics language, without attenuating or transforming its meaning, has for some religious thinkers illustrated the potential for cooptation involved in addressing a secular world on its terms and in its concepts. The tensions between religious discourse and bioethics pose dual challenges of accessibility and meaning. The sense diat the contributions of religious discourse to contemporary bioethics are limited by these interdisciplinary, theological, and political parameters assumes of course that religious traditions have something substantively distinctive to communicate to a public, secular audience. The nature of the accessibility-meaning dichotomy can initially be illustrated by attending to some much contested questions in contemporary bioethics. Part of the responsibility of bio-ethics is to be "prophetic," challenging to accountability the institutional and professional presuppositions of the health care system and the society of which it is a part.
