Orthodox Christian Bioethics
The Role of Hospitality (philoxenia), Dignity, and Vulnerability in Global Bioethics
by Rabee Toumi
Imprint: Pickwick Publications
This book advocates a substantive common ground in global bioethics. It starts from an Orthodox Christian anthropology to highlight the relationship between hospitality, dignity, and vulnerability as the meeting point between strangers, regardless of their value system. The universal experience of suffering and death is the unifying starting point of that anthropology.
Therefore, in medicine, where physicians and patients meet as utter strangers, not only as moral strangers, hospitality highlights the human dignity and vulnerability of both parties and establishes gratitude, compassion, and solidarity as the constructive building blocks of a healing practice of medicine and a humane medical system, locally and globally.
Rabee Toumi, a physician by training, pursued in-depth theological studies in search of the meaning of health, suffering, dying, and medical practice. After medical school, he earned two advanced degrees in Orthodox Christian theology from seminaries in Lebanon and the US. In 2018, he earned his PhD in healthcare ethics from Duquesne University. Starting in 2010, he served as a deacon in the Antiochian Orthodox Church of North America and has assumed the priestly service of a parish in the Washington, DC, metro area since 2018.
“The Orthodox perspective on bioethics set forth in this book reclaims the oft-invoked ‘phronema of the church’—a term too often spray-painted as golden veneer over sectarian distortions of theology and spirituality—and rejects the temptation to indulge in self-congratulatory exceptionalism and isolationism. By mining tradition for insights about the dignity and vulnerability of all humans, and the centrality of hospitality, Fr. Toumi makes a fruitful Orthodox contribution to global bioethics.”
—Bogdan G. Bucur, Duquesne University
“This book by Rabee Toumi on Orthodox Christian Bioethics is an important contribution to the broad field of bioethics and places Orthodox thinking into the context of questions about human dignity and vulnerability. Toumi’s connection of dignity, vulnerability, and hospitality to questions of bioethics is enlightening and can be applied to many Christian ethical situations. This book is excellent for courses in Christian bioethics.”
—Gayle E. Woloschak, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University
“Dr. Toumi engages an elusive topic in a clear and practical manner. He insightfully explains how the Orthodox Christian mindset can nurture common ground with other value systems, religious or secular. The goal is to build a caring consensus in global bioethics discourse. His extensive training in medicine and theology provides an extraordinary interdisciplinary expertise to explore the human condition respectfully and imaginatively. His astute analysis will have a widespread and much-needed impact.”
—Gerard Magill, Duquesne University