Conceiving Parenthood

Could it be possible that a Christian viewpoint paved the way for genetic engineering? It is, in fact, likely. The very Protestant tradition that should have emphasized a sense of divine gratuity, human contingency, and the radical giftedness of all life came in twentieth-century America to epitomize justification by meticulously planned procreation. Accomplishing the proper model of family life ? a very specific configuration of domesticity ? became the means by which an American couple could prove themselves providentially fit and encouraging this model would do no less than ???save the world.??? This culturally loaded conception of kinship also subtly distinguished ???us??? from ???them, ??? too often rendering those whose lives did not cohere as ???ill begotten.??? After a well-thought out confrontation, Amy Laura Hall offers us hope for living out grace ? a future secured neither through scientific progress nor by way of the march of children to advance the race, but through the inscrutable birth of one child ? the Word made flesh. She carefully establishes that faithful discipleship may mean not only following the child born in Bethlehem but bringing one??'s own children along, to identify with and live among those who are considered today to be ???the least of these.??? Conceiving Parenthood calls Christians who are intent on being of use to God??'s work in the world to rethink their motives for choosing certain neighborhoods, schools, drugs, and children and to risk in multiple ways a holy kind of ecclesial miscegenation.

Amy Laura Hall is associate professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina.