March 17, 2007

Evangelical Bioethics and the Web - washingtonpost.com

That's the title of today's story in the Washington Post about Joe Carter, evangelical blogger read by zillions, and his role on in bioethics debates. The blog is lauded by mainstream religious blog beliefnet.com and ranks up there among awards for blogdom. Conservative bioethics folks are out in force in the piece (as usual) to support absolutely anyone who isn't liberal, and I get spun as loving the site for its window to the evangelical "world:"
"When you read it, you get the sense that this is someone who has thought this out," said Matthew Eppinette, assistant director of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, an evangelical bioethics think tank in Illinois that hired Carter in 2005. At the time, Carter was based in Fort Worth, repairing computer systems on fighter jets by day and blogging by night. Eppinette read the blog and called Carter in for an interview.

Glenn McGee, director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute in Albany, N.Y., and editor of the mainstream American Journal of Bioethics, said he checks Carter's blog not for scholarly reasons -- "most people in this field don't read blogs and are incredibly luddite" -- but more as cultural research.

"I'll go to his site to see, 'What are evangelicals saying about [the sexually transmitted human papilloma virus]?' I think he's a good mirror of what people are saying; he's plugged in," McGee said.

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