Book Launch: Preserving the Penultimate: The Impact of Bonhoeffer and Schweitzer on Healthcare

Preserving the Penultimate: The Impact of Bonhoeffer and Schweitzer on Healthcare

Preserving the Penultimate brings two of the 20th century's most renowned Christian thinkers, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Albert Schweitzer, into conversation around the emerging possibilities of healthcare. Here Bonhoeffer's theology meets Schweitzer's philosophy and praxis to examine the place that healthcare should hold within the Church and its mission. Using the crisis within the National Health Service in the United Kingdom as an example, the insights which these renowned thinkers bring to healthcare are explored. Is the Church ignoring a part of its mission having retreated from the world of healthcare? Taking Bonhoeffer's notion of redeeming the penultimate (our present reality), as well as Schweitzer's emphasis on the practical application of Christian tenets, Preserving the Penultimate courses a path through the overlaps of these two thinkers, ultimately leading to a 're-envisioning the praxis of healthcare as theologically central to the mission of the Church.' As questions around healthcare become more urgent than ever, the role of Christianity to offer alternatives and inspire a broader vision of care is illuminated, considering not only the physical but the spiritual well-being of the person.

Professor Gerard Loughlin has also kindly endorsed the book, saying:

'Robert Jaggs-Fowler draws on the work of two Lutheran theologians, Albert Schweitzer and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to argue — perhaps provocatively but also persuasively — that Christians need to be strenuously involved in the promotion and delivery of healthcare. From Bonhoeffer, Jaggs-Fowler takes the distinction between the ultimate and the penultimate, between heaven and the world, to argue that it is the ultimate that requires Christians to be concerned with the penultimate, with life here and now. It is in the world that the Church encounters Christ through being Christ for others. Caring for the health of the neighbour is a spiritual undertaking, and one the Church needs to pursue with vigour and courage. This is a finely written, enlightening and challenging book.'