Book Review
Humanity's Nature
Nature's End: The Theological Meaning of the New Genetics
by Richard Sherlock
ISI Books, Religion and Contemporary Culture Series, 2010
(230 pages, $25.00, paperback)
reviewed by J. Daryl Charles
Nature's End joins a growing list of cultural commentaries on the "age of technology" and the challenges it poses to our understanding of being human. Many of these, in one form or fashion, owe a conspicuous debt to the pioneering work of people like Hans Jonas (The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age; Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz; and Technik, Medizin und Ethik ["On Technology, Medicine and Ethics"]), Jacques Ellul (The Technological Society and The Technological Bluff), and Neil Postman (Technopoly), as well as to C. S. Lewis's classic The Abolition of Man. Closer to our time, the encyclical work of John Paul II, particularly that which appeared in the 1990s, must also be deemed enormously significant for its theological discernment and incisive social criticism.
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J. Daryl Charles is the Acton Institute Affiliated Scholar in Theology & Ethics. He is the author or editor of twenty books, including Retrieving the Natural Law (2008), Natural Law and Religious Freedom (2018), and, most recently, Just War and Christian Traditions (forthcoming). He is also co-editor of Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God's Gifts for a Fallen World, Volume 3 (2020). He is a contributing editor to Touchstone.
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