Free Republic

Dr. Leon R. Kass, a widely published author, award-winning humanities teacher, and one of America’s leading moral philosophers and experts on medical ethics, will deliver the 2009 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced today. The annual NEH-sponsored Jefferson Lecture is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities. “Leon Kass is an outstanding scholar, a gifted teacher, and one of our nation’s leading humanists,” said NEH Acting Chairman Carole M. Watson. “He has brought the wisdom of the humanities to bear on many topics, from bioethics...

NEW YORK, November 7, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The meaning of human nature itself is under threat from a new philosophy of “soul-less scientism” that will undermine “our own self-understanding as human beings” and reduces the aspirations of mankind to the purely material realm. This new philosophy outstrips the danger posed by the actual techniques and technologies of modern biomedical science, said Dr. Leon Kass, speaking to a New York audience in October.  “Scientific ideas and discoveries” he said, “are being enlisted to do battle against our traditional religious and moral teachings, and even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom and...

Let me tell you how we’re going to die. Twenty percent of us, according to a Rand Corp. study, are going to get cancer or another rapidly debilitating condition, and we’ll be dead within a year of getting the disease. Another 20 percent of us are going to suffer from some cardiac or respiratory failure. We’ll suffer years of worsening symptoms, a few life-threatening episodes, and then eventually die. But 40 percent of us will suffer from some form of dementia (most frequently Alzheimer’s disease or a disabling stroke). Our gradual, unrelenting path toward death will take eight or 10...

<p>A leading conservative foundation has named two newspaper columnists, a law professor and a presidential adviser on bioethics as recipients of its inaugural Bradley Prizes.</p> <p>The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation announced yesterday that the prizes &#8212; worth $250,000 each &#8212; were awarded to Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, bioethicist Leon R. Kass, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer and Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell, whose syndicated column appears in The Washington Times.</p>

At a recent conference in Washington, D.C., the questions were asked: “Why Genesis? Why Now?” The event, sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, was a discussion of the new book The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis by Professor Leon Kass. Both Kass’s book and the conference it inspired raise a question that Christians ought to welcome: What is the role of the Bible, in particular, Genesis, in twenty-first century American life? Do words written more than three millennia ago have anything to tell us about how we ought to live our lives today? The answer, according to Kass,...