2006 Essays

The Religious Obligation to Ask Questions of Nature and the State: Bonhoeffer on the Protection and Dignity of Human Life, in the Context of DNA-based Genetic Medicine Today

Pollack, Robert

This paper is dedicated, on the occasion of his retirement, to the life and work of my dear friend and colleague David Weiss Halivni, Littauer Professor of Classical Jewish Civilization, Department of Religion, Columbia University. It is an expanded version of my “Witness to Power: How the Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Speak To Us Today,” CSSR News (Columbia University Earth Institute, Winter 2004), 13. This new version was prepared at the invitation and with the wholehearted support of the past and present Presidents of the Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, Revs. Donald Shriver and Joseph C. Hough, Jr. Their friendship and the unique Bonhoeffer Archive at the Burke Library made it possible for me to reach across many professional, religious and ideological boundaries to write this paper, in which my own work is drawn from my books Signs of Life, The Missing Moment, and The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith. The Bonhoeffer Lecture.