ABSTRACT
The occasion of the special supplement on religion and bioethics serves once again, that the field of bioethics is a creature of its time and history. It grew up during the 1960s and 1970s in an era of affluence and social utopianism, in a culture that was experimenting with an expansive array of newly found rights and unprecedented opportunities for personal freedom and in the context of a national history that has long struggled to find the right place for religion in its public life. The most striking change over the past two decades or so has been the secularization of bioethics. The field has moved from one dominated by religious and medical traditions to one now increasingly shaped by philosophical and legal concepts. The consequence has been a mode of public discourse that emphasizes secular themes: universal rights, individual self-direction, procedural justice, and a systematic denial of either a common good or a transcendent individual good.
