Tag: twins

The Reason for Special Babies

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Thaddeus Pope, a professor at Widener School of Law and (the well-named) keeper of the site Medical Futility Blog writes today about a case of inoperable conjoined twins whose mother is opposing the hospital’s reluctancy to continue periodic resuscitation efforts. The hospital is concerned that their efforts to keep the twin boys alive may be causing them pain and suffering. Pope writes that “the process has been agonizing for doctors and nurses at the University of Illinois Medical Center, some of whom worry that their interventions might be going too far.” Says the mother, Brianna Manns, who decided not to have an abortion after learning that the twins would probably not survive:

“There must be a reason why I have special babies like this,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s God’s say-so. . . . I believe in God 100 percent. Yes, the machines are man-made. But God gave them those machines as well. Everything goes back to God.”

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This Fixed, Steady Twoness

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by Scott Korb

Whether he intended it or not Philip Pullman has written, most recently, a religious story. And insofar as The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is a religious story, as the title suggests it is a Christian one. (Though, it’s true, as Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has said, the Gospels—especially Mark’s—are better, even on Pullman’s own terms). In some ways, Pullman’s title, which alone suggests the book’s supposed scandal, says it all. Not Jesus Christ, or even Jesus the Christ, but Jesus AND Christ, twin brothers borne of Mary, who was, in yet another supposed scandal to Christians, seduced by a figure calling himself an “an angel,” who “in order not to frighten her … had assumed the appearance of a young man, just like the one of the young men who spoke to her by the well.”

So, enough about Philip Pullman.

By their nature, religious stories self-complicate. Take the Gospels, just for example, which all tell similar stories “according to” someone or another—Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, say, names that attached themselves to the early Christian communities who wrote and kept these Gospels in the wake of Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 C.E. Continue Reading →