A perception of “Christian bioethics” developed by the American philosopher Hugo Tristram Engelhardt in Russia requires a systematic interdisciplinary analysis. This is due to the realities of medical practice, as well as cultural and historical differences between the Russian and American societies. In Russia, there are certain difficulties in the open discussion of ethical issues in the public sphere. However, the recently growing participation of the Orthodox Church in public debates on the issues of medicine and biotechnology produce a basis for a reception of Engelhardt’s Christian bioethics. This article presents an analysis of how Engelhardt’s academic carrier was connected to his personal transformation, and how a “logical positivist” and physician interested in genetics, through his studies of continental philosophy, history of medicine, Catholicism and bioethics, came up finally as an founder of Christian bioethics based on Eastern Christian Orthodoxy. This analysis is purposed to expand the theoretical discussion of moral dilemmas posed at the intersection of medicine, religion and philosophy within the Russian academic discourse.

Birth, suffering, disability, disease and death were by medicine’s successes placed within a context of seemingly novel challenges that cried out for new responses. Secular bioethics rose in response to the demands of these new biomedical technologies in the context of a culture fragmented in moral pluralism. While secular bioethics promised to unite persons separated by diverse religious and moral assumption, this is a promise that could not be fulfilled. Reason alone cannot provide canonical, content-full moral guidance or justify a moral community capable of binding all persons. Christian bioethics, as part of a way of life embedded in authentic worship, offers content, meaning and understanding where secular bioethics has failed. For Christians, resolution of bioethical controversies will not be found through appeals to foundational rational arguments or isolated scriptural quotations, but only in a Christian community united in authentic faith.

The term “culture wars” has been used to describe deep, apparently intractable, disagreements between groups for many years. In contemporary discourse, it refers to disputes regarding significant moral matters carried out in the public square and for which there appears to be no way to achieve consensus or compromise. One set of battle lines is drawn between those who hold traditional Christian commitments and those who do not. Christian bioethics is nested in a set of moral and metaphysical understandings that collide with those of the dominant secular culture. The result is a gulf between a moral life and an approach to bioethics framed in the face of a transcendent God and a final judgment versus a moral life and an approach to bioethics framed as if the world were without ultimate meaning and as if death were the end of personal existence. These approaches are separated by a moral and metaphysical gulf that sustains incompatible life worlds and incompatible understandings of bioethics. Attempts to bridge the gulf with secular reason are ineffective because there is no shared conception of reason or standard of evidence. Efforts to use the state to enforce a particular set of metaphysical and moral commitments, whether secular or religious, lead to public disputes with a war-like character.

The article presents the concept of Bio-Ethik by the German theologian Fritz Jahr (1895-1953) and discusses the reasons of the interest to his legacy in Central Europe. The popularity of Fritz Jahr’s works fits into the specific context of a complex development of bioethics in Central Europe at the turn of the twenty-first century. The appeal to Fritz Jahr’s ideas in the field of bioethics allows us to assess the contribution of Christian thinkers to the articulation of bioethical issues and to raise the question of why in modern bioethics, which is trying to draw upon universal, non-religious values, there was a demand for theological works of a Protestant pastor. The article describes the attitude to bioethics in Germany at the turn of the 1980s-90s, the ideological conflict of the “anti-bioethics” movement and the context of the new reception of Fritz Jahr’s works.

One of France’s leading bioethics experts discusses the debate around assisted reproductive technologies, in particular, the issue of legal access to such technologies for single women and same-sex female couples. The author offers his detailed - and mostly critical - commentary on the advisory documents, issued by the “National Ethics Advisory Committee”, a special body created to publicly discuss issues of bioethics legislation. (In August 2020, three years after the publication of this article, the French National Assembly approved the new version of the Law on Bioethics that was discussed in this paper).

The article assesses bioethical issues of surrogacy from a Christian perspective and the possibility of adopting a cryopreserved embryo in the current socio-cultural context. Pregnancy of an adopting woman represents only a visible, technical similarity to the surrogacy; it is now commonly called “snowflake adoption.” In fact, such a pregnancy implies a different meaning and different goals. The study considers the following ethical dilemma: an invasion into marital union while using surrogacy for embryo adoption versus the potential death of an embryo in the absence of surrogacy. Any person, as Christian anthropology claims, originates from the first moment of conception. Therefore, respect for personal dignity includes the preservation of life and health at the embryonic stage even in a cryopreserved state. The potential death of a frozen embryo would be considered a more significant ethical evil than the intrusion of an adoptive mother into a marital union. Thus, snowflake adoption can be ethically justified to save a cryopreserved embryo if a woman adopts it and will raise the born child.

The article addresses a number of issues related to the profession of wet nurses in pre-Revolutionary Russia. This topic is particularly relevant in connection with the current discussion of the alienation of women’s reproductive function. According to infant care manuals, while choosing a wet nurse, doctors recommended that mothers consider not only physical aspects, but also ethical issues. However, in practice, the ethics receded into the background. Wet nurses were used in almost all families that had reached a certain financial and social status. Doctors’ recommendations were referred to justify the fact that mothers should not feed their own infants. Therefore, such recommendations served to justify an ethically questionable practice. The most serious medical problem was that wet nurses were distributors of syphilis. Many nurses started their work in orphanages where they contracted syphilis from infected foundling babies. As it was impossible to diagnose syphilis at the early stages, the infected wet nurse would become the carrier of the disease and, when hired by a family, infect the customer’s child. The article is based on the materials in the Odessa province.

The article offers an analysis of approaches of different Christian confessions to understanding of the moral status of human embryo in the context of modern biomedical developments. It compares challenges faced by the proponents of each denominational position and their arguments. According to documents and papers of the theologians there are at least three specific positions in relation to moral status of early human embryo: conservative, liberal and indefinite. The author focuses on arguments of such liberal Protestant authors as T. Peters, R. Cole-Turner and J. Polkinghorne; on strong and weak aspects of Roman Catholic perspective; and specific characteristics of Orthodox Christian approaches.

This paper studies the attitudes of the Soviet authorities and society towards the problem of abortion during the New Economic Policy (NEP). In the 1920s, communist ideologists and population still under influence of traditional values based on religious ethics (though often indifferent towards religion and Church) expressed extremely different views on the issue. Even religiously indifferent people used to take part in religious ceremonies such as weddings and christenings. The traditions of the Orthodox Church provided them with moral support in the era of global changes. The ideological message of the Soviet authorities was also controversial. Officially sexual liberty was allowed, as was the freedom of marriage and divorce. Women were encouraged to work, to be involved in social activities, to be educated. However, there was little social and medical help for mothers. Traditional marriage was being destroyed, and an increasing number of abortions, both legal and illegal, was a result. Those who were in charge of the sanitary propaganda were worried and encouraged people to have children for Soviet Russia instead of abortions despite all difficulties. In fact, ordinary people knew that many children meant poverty and poor health for the whole family. There was almost no available contraception, and abortion was virtually only method of birth control. In spite of the efforts of Soviet propaganda, abortion was perceived as a nasty but almost unavoidable part of everyday life. The author concludes that no consensus on the problem of abortion in the Soviet society of the 1920s emerged, and to some extent it could not have emerged under such circumstances.

This article gives a review of two books examining the religious situation in “post-secular” Vietnam. The book of American anthropologist Shaun Malarney “Culture, Ritual, and Revolution in Vietnam” (2002) offers a research of the transformations of religious practices and morality caused by the 1945 communist revolution: the author shows the polyphony of understanding of morality and ritual in Vietnamese society. The edited volume “Religion, Place and Modernity: Spatial Articulation in Southeast Asia and East Asia” (Ed. by M. Dickhardt and A. Lauser in 2016) examines, within an “anthropology of space and place,” the emergence of new “secular religions” in Vietnam.

This paper examines changes in the liturgical and paraliturgical practices of Roman Catholics in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s. Nine documents from different archives outside Russia were first used to show changes made at the request of Russian Catholics. These documents deal with a number of disciplinary issues, such as the time for the celebration of Mass, observation of a natural fast before Mass, permission for lay people to bring Holy communion to the sick or imprisoned people. The Holy See readily relaxed canonical requirements. Consequently, at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, the time for the celebration of Mass became variable, moving more often to the evening hours; the rules of a natural fast before Mass for clergy and laity were relaxed, which paved the way for regular communion at evening Masses; laity were given permission to bring Holy communion to those who could not personally hear the Mass; the practice of stipends for Mass became an instrument of financial support given by the Holy See to impoverished Catholic clergymen in critical situations. The main reason for these dramatic changes was the anti-religious policy of the Soviet government and the disruption of the traditional calendar. The fact of continuing contacts with the Vatican sheds light on those aspects of religious life in Soviet Russia that are not reflected in the official Soviet documentation.

The paper deals with the Russian émigrés’ pilgrimage to the Holy Land after the Second World War. The author analyzes the phenomenon of the restoration of group pilgrimages as a process of reinventing the pilgrimage tradition first developed mainly in the peasant milieu at the turn of the twentieth century. The annual trips from France organized by Bishop Methodian Kulman served as the basis for the new pilgrimage movement and the formation of a new community of “co-pilgrims”, uniting Russian Orthodox emigrants from all over the world. Perceived as a romantic ideal, the old peasant pilgrimage to Palestine became a source of new meanings for pilgrims in the second half of the 20th century. The author explores the process of gradual ritualization and formalization of the trips; the reconstruction of the Russian mental map of the Holy Land; the use of the pilgrimage as a way to cope with longing for the lost homeland and seeking authenticity by reproducing institutions of the past. The pilgrimage, interpreted as a spiritual ideal, became one of the ways to consolidate the Russian emigration.

The article offers a reconstruction of the social ideals of Russian spiritualists. Main sources include texts revealing spiritualists' ideas about the structure of the spiritual world; structure and characteristics of spiritual circles; and literary works by spiritualists reflecting their social ideals. Although the social and political views of Russian spiritualists were mostly conservative, their ontological views contained elements of social radicalism. The author distinguishes between the two types of spiritualists - rationalists and traditionalists - depending on their attitude towards the Orthodox Church, Christian theology and their specific views about the spiritual world. All spiritualists viewed the society critically as gripped with disease. Rationalist spiritualism was critical towards Christian dogmatic and practice, and although its supporters advocated the preservation of the social and political status quo, they hoped for both gradual social and political transformation and the realization of social ideals in the spiritual world. The traditionalists, despite their commitment to monarchy and the Church institution, expected a millenarian overturn and thus challenged the social and political order. Overall, the spiritualist social ideals are close to communitarian social projects based upon the idea of Christian brotherhood.

The article deals with the Muslim reaction to the Russian Orthodox missionaries' challenge in the polemic work by Hasan ‘Ata Gabashi “Nur al-haqiqa” (1886). The author explores the internal mechanism of Islamic discourse, which works to protect the sphere of Muslim dogmatic (‘aqida) from the “alien” influence and is realized through the delineation of protective boundaries. As a defence tactic, Gabashi uses the strategy of refuting “false idea” or “false teaching” from ‘Ilm al-Kalam. The paper analyses the development of the narrative, the argumentation used by Gabashi and the behavior of those involved in the polemics. As he implements his “protective project,” Gabashi explores and criticizes Christian ideas in terms of his own discourse. As the Muslim author, Gabashi does not reject the entire Christian doctrine or the entire Bible, but selectively criticizes “distortions” that are contrary to Islam.