The Baptism in the Jordan / Biotechnology & Morality, Part II

“When it describes the ages of Jesus’ life and identifies the laws that shape his time, the theology of the mysteries unlocks the meaning, not only of Christian existence, but of history and of the world itself.”

“With his highly developed theological responsiveness and supreme command of his art, Bach was able to to deploy perfectly ordinary compositional techniques with such focused attention to his text as to present a commentary on the meaning of the event in musical language.”

“Active participation requires a perception of the reality in which one participates, the glory of the Heavenly Banquet. To understand the banquet as heavenly , signs and symbols of heavenly realities are required, which in turn requires noble beauty, a beauty that reveals the ontological reality.”

“With ANT, the enucleated egg—because of genetic manipulations done either to the egg or to the donor cell or to both simultaneously—is prevented from reprogramming the transferred genome to an embryo-like epigenetic state. . . . no embryo—no organism—is generated.”

“Epigenetics, then, may be a (co)determinant of the one-celled embryo’s phenotypic profile, but it is not the primary determinant of its ontological status tout court .”

"OAR, like all the other methods of ANT, is not the creation of stem cells without the creation of an embryo, but the cloning of a modified embryo. OAR, in a word, is cloning with a twist."

“We can form proper ethical judgments with respect to biotechnological science’s production and manipulation of embryonic stem cells for health-serving ends only insofar as we recover adequate notions of nature and human-organic life (as gift).”