The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

What does it mean to be human? Western, largely Christian understandings of what it means to be human were deeply challenged by the Enlightenment. That challenge is written into the founding documents of modern nation states like the United States, and is reflected everywhere in popular drama, literature, film, and television.  The classical Christian understanding of what it means to be human has been defined in terms of a relationship to a transcendent creator of humanity and the world, and of kinship relationships within clans, tribes, or ethnic nations, and of an inherited status, class, or gender. In the modern era what it means to be human is defined in terms of the immanent frame, citizenship in a nation state, and the responsibility to create one self, one’s social world, and even the natural world in the company of fellow humans, fellow citizens, and fellow creatures. People who might once be called nomads are now defined in terms of citizenship, and become migrants, immig...

The Alabama Supreme Court recently ruled that frozen embryos (with between 6 and 10 cells)  created through in-vitro fertilization had the same protection under the law as living humans. The head of that court gave an unreservedly religious rational for the ruling. (Read here for details:  https://religionnews.com/2024/02/27/the-alabama-ruling-on-embryos-claimed-to-be-christian-christians-arent-so-sure/ ) As the Religious News article points out, this ruling is closely related to religious reasons for banning abortion based on the idea that life begins at conception. Yet beneath questions of fetal personhood is a more fundamental issue. Traditionalist Christians believe that there is   a moral order to the way in which humans should reproduce. This isn't limited to confining sexual intercourse to a marriage between a man and a woman.   It includes everything related to the uniting of a human sperm and a human egg and the subsequent nourishing of the embryo in the wom...