In Jesus the Divine Physician, Fr. James McTavish has compiled 14 outstanding award-winning essays in medical ethics from a faith-based perspective. They address a broad range of urgent and ethically challenging questions arising in health care that Catholic and other faith-based healthcare professionals need to address in an ethically sound way to continue and advance the healing and saving mission of Christ in health care today.
Half of the essays focus on the need among health care professionals to develop and sustain a faith-based ethos and how such an ethos ought to pervade the person’s whole attitude (joyful) and approach to those one serves and to one’s co-servants (compassion and concern). The other essays address the full range of the human experience of being mortal. They range from the individual and social dimensions of applying this ethos at the beginning of life to people who are sick, suffering, and dying at the end of life. In all cases, Fr. James shows how faith needs to be informed by sound ethical reasoning and informed by Catholic social teaching.
For each of these often medically and socially complex realities, Fr. James communicates clearly and simply his solid grasp of the medical realities that he often illustrates using memorable and humorous examples from his own experience. This aspect of his essays manifests his impressive medical credentials and prior life as a surgeon. He also highlights and clarifies with remarkable nuance the ethical dimensions of faith-based responses to such realities. This aspect of his essays manifests an impressive depth and breadth of understanding and respect for core teachings of the Catholic moral tradition and of old and new thinkers from other traditions (Aristotle). Most fundamentally, in these essays, Fr. James manifests his life-changing commitment to implementing and advancing Jesus’ healing and saving mission in health care today by inviting his readers to join him and many others on this world-changing journey.
