Orthodox Christian Bioethics: The Role of Hospitality (Philoxenia), Dignity, and Vulnerability in Global Bioethics - Paperback

by Rabee Toumi (Author)

This book advocates a substantive common ground in global bioethics. It starts from an Orthodox Christian anthropology to highlight the relationship between hospitality, dignity, and vulnerability as the meeting point between strangers, regardless of their value system. The universal experience of suffering and death is the unifying starting point of that anthropology. Therefore, in medicine, where physicians and patients meet as utter strangers, not only as moral strangers, hospitality highlights the human dignity and vulnerability of both parties and establishes gratitude, compassion, and solidarity as the constructive building blocks of a healing practice of medicine and a humane medical system, locally and globally.

Author Biography

Rabee Toumi, a physician by training, pursued in-depth theological studies in search of the meaning of health, suffering, dying, and medical practice. After medical school, he earned two advanced degrees in Orthodox Christian theology from seminaries in Lebanon and the US. In 2018, he earned his PhD in healthcare ethics from Duquesne University. Starting in 2010, he served as a deacon in the Antiochian Orthodox Church of North America and has assumed the priestly service of a parish in the Washington, DC, metro area since 2018.