“Bioethics 101”

Christopher Church, Ph.D. has taught philosophy and religion courses at the Baptist College of Health Sciences since 1995, when he was one of the five inaugural General Studies faculty members. In 2000, he helped organize the Ethics Committee at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, where he has long served as Ethics Committee Chair and continues as a lead Clinical Ethics Consultant. Dr. Church has co-chaired the Baptist Memorial Health Care’s system-wide end-of-life task force, and has served on the ethics committees for Baptist Memorial Hospital-Desoto and now Baptist-Memphis. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Mid-South Coalition for Comfort Care & Bioethics.

Dr. Church’s bioethics publications include a chapter in Ethics and Research with Children: Learning from Cases, (ed. Eric Kodish. New York: Oxford University Press), as well as co-authored articles in Current Opinion in Pediatrics, the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the Journal of Clinical Ethics, and the American Journal of Bioethics. His religious studies publications include a commentary on the Epistle of James (Macon, GA: Smythe & Helwys, 2004). He has presented papers at national and international meetings in the fields of bioethics and religious studies.

A graduate of the University of Georgia (B.S. in Chemistry, ’82) and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (M.Div., ’85 and Ph.D., ’90), Dr. Church has taken master’s level work in bioethics at Trinity International University (Chicago) and the Medical College of Wisconsin (Milwaukee). In summer 2000, he was one of fifteen scholars tapped for the National Endowment for the Humanities’ “Bioethics in Particular” seminar at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. In 2011, he completed the inaugural Clinical Ethics Immersion Experience at the Washington Hospital Center. An account of that experience appeared in the summer 2012 issue of the Journal of Clinical Ethics.