For some, the attraction of Roman Catholicism is its emphasis on social ethics. The perception for some—especially those converting from forms of fundamentalism—is that Protestants have become hyper-focused on individual salvation while the Catholics have been busy building and sustaining hospitals, schools, orphanages, nursing homes. And yet, Christian history reveals that Protestants have and can have a robust social ethic while affirming a biblical understanding of personal salvation by faith.

A surprisingly large number of conservative intellectuals in the United States are Roman Catholic. Consider, for example, that six of the nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court are Catholics. Many of these public intellectuals are converts from Protestant Christianity. This leaves some with the sense that the Protestant tradition is somehow deficient.
Both the Catholic and Orthodox churches make weighty claims by purporting to be the true church established, continued, and kept by Jesus Christ himself. In Why Do Protestants Convert?, Brad Littlejohn and Chris Castaldo consider nine motivations for Protestant conversions. Despite these claims, the authors argue that the conversion of Protestants often says less about the strength of the Catholic or Orthodox churches that it does about perceived weaknesses in modern Protestant practice.
Intellectual Concerns
Many more people convert to Roman Catholicism than Orthodoxy, so that move is the focus of the book and this review. The Protestant to Catholic pipeline is a topic of ongoing cultural discussion. However, according to a 2015 Pew study on the U. S. religious landscape, Roman Catholicism is losing more members than it is gaining from any source. Still, the conversion trend is significant.
Littlejohn, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Castaldo, lead pastor at New Covenant Church, note that Catholic converts are oftentimes intellectuals who carry a certain public credibility. Historically, converts like John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, Richard Neuhaus, and Peter Kreeft have written a great deal about their conversion narratives. Thus, Roman Catholicism, compellingly perceived and portrayed, makes some Protestants wonder whether we left some of the best intellectual resources behind during the Reformation.
In reality, Protestants have at least equal intellectual resources to other Christian traditions. However, “until we teach them effectively to our pastors, parishioners, and children, we should hardly be surprised when they go in search of greener pastures” (10). The apparent contrast between Roman Catholic and Protestant intellectualism is “in large part the natural result of the self-inflicted wounds of the late 20th century scandal of the evangelical mind, which will take generations to undo” (9–10).
At the same time, the Protestant intellectual tradition has largely been overlooked by many contemporary believers. And, doctrines like the belief in “total depravity” have caused some to believe that Protestants disregard the value of human reason, or philosophy. In contrast, the Roman Catholic view appears more positive toward reason, is more openly reliant on philosophy, and thus to some appears better equipped to deal with the social challenges of the day.
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We should not be passive participants in the work of the church as members, even when it comes to the sermon or the life of our pastor. He is meant to serve you, and you him. He is meant to teach you, but you are not therefore absolved from the commandment to make disciples.

“Five-billion people.” I answered, “There are five-billion people online right now, according to the latest data.”
I had been asked to come on the radio to talk about three news stories that stood out to me from the previous week. Two had come to mind easily, but for the third I decided to look for something encouraging; I wanted to find a story about a local pastor doing the work of the gospel or who was being celebrated for ministry faithfulness.
I searched everywhere.
I found nothing.
The “five-billion people online” statistic jumped out to me on my search, and so I decided I would use it to make a point. If there are that many people online, then a good deal of them must be Christian. So where are all the stories about tremendous pastors? I know they’re out there ready to be told! Yet, it doesn’t seem like anyone is telling them.
I finished the interview by saying something to the effect of, “I’d just love to use my time here to say how thankful I am for my pastor. He loves our church and loves God, and that might sound boring, but I think that is awesome.”
It wasn’t flashy, it wasn’t controversial, it was just true.
As much as I would love to see more people publicly praising their pastors, the work starts closer to home. In the first two installments of this series, I’ve talked about what a sermon is and how to get the most out of a sermon each Sunday, but in this article, I want to look at how and why we should encourage the man standing in the pulpit. How do we love our pastors well, submit to them, and encourage them? To be clear, this is an area we all need to grow in—myself included.
Be most known for encouragement. “We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves” (1 Thess. 5:12–13).
I make it a point to ensure everyone whom I love, knows that I love them. The words “I love you” hold a specific weight when spoken to my wife, but they aren’t reserved merely for her. Jesus taught us that people would know who we belong to and whose disciples we are if we “have love for one another” (John 13:35). It is, therefore, no surprise that this extends to our leaders. Pastor Jared C. Wilson has mentioned on several occasions that he never leaves the pulpit without expressing his love for the congregation.
If your pastor did this, would that expression of love be reciprocated?
My guess is that if you’re plugged into a local church, whatever differences you might have with your pastor, you do love him. Like a cheesy 90s rom-com, however, this love might go days, weeks, or years without being revealed, leading both parties to question its existence.
This commandment to love is accompanied by another that seems to be intrinsically linked to the first. “Esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves.”
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While Goligher describes the overriding focus on personal autonomy as central to most arguments in favor of PAS-MAID, he doesn’t delve deeply enough into how this focus on autonomy shapes Western cultural imagination about what personhood actually is.  In his book ‘What it Means to be Human’ legal scholar and bioethicist O. Carter Snead provides an in-depth analysis of this default anthropological understanding and its implications for the legal infrastructure surrounding central bioethical issues today ranging from abortion to assisted reproductive technologies to PAS-MAID.  Snead’s central thesis is that an anthropology of “expressive individualism” is baked into the legal understanding of these issues.

Making the Hidden Plain
As a current fellow training in palliative care medicine, one of the great gifts of my work is the ability to daily bear witness to those who face impending death.  While this “gift” may strike some as morbid or masochistic, I presume this view to be held by those who have not themselves spent time around the dying.  Being able to come alongside and learn from those who are facing imminent death affords a sobering but deeply important opportunity for those of us who remain ostensibly healthy to reckon with our own finitude in a way that is otherwise culturally discouraged.  And this work is not merely voyeuristic; when done well, communing with the dying affords the patient the opportunity to maintain relationship and exercise virtue in her role as teacher to those who would come after her.  
Yet this privilege—to interact with and learn from the terminally ill—is one that is largely proscribed in our contemporary Western culture.  Rather than grapple with our own embodiment and contingency, our teenagers dabble in prophylactic botox.  Rather than lionize and render what is due to our elderly forebears, we favor institutionalization.  Rather than foreground the experiences of our sick and dying, we largely sequester them.  While there has been an encouraging movement toward improving the dying experience of patients through the establishment of palliative care as a medical specialty, even this term “palliate,” which derives from the Latin “palliam”—to cloak—betrays our discomfort with the transparency of death.
As the conversation surrounding the moral permissibility of physician-assisted suicide/medical aid in dying (PAS-MAID) steadily amplifies, this societal distancing from death influences the views of those on both sides of the argument, but ultimately places the burden of proof on those of us who oppose the practice.  Insofar as the act of death remains a largely hidden, privatized experience, arguments for the priority of personal autonomy will be progressively strengthened rather than questioned. To the degree that the idea of death remains taboo and uncomfortable to consider, society will generally accept the supposed preservation of dignity and mitigation of suffering purported by those who advocate for MAID. Thoughtful arguments in opposition will, meanwhile, atrophy over time.
In his recently published book How Should We Then Die? Canadian critical care physician Ewan Goligher seeks to bring the issue of death, and the attendant question of the moral permissibility of PAS-MAID, to the fore in a form that is succinct, accessible, and internally consistent.  Goligher is clear and persistent in his argument that PAS-MAID constitutes a grave transgression of the intrinsic goodness of human life and ought never be considered licit.  As he states from the outset, his goal is to provide an argument consisting of a series of ten distinct “theses” addressing various facets of this overall claim, intended for Christian audiences grappling with the urgency of the PAS-MAID question.
Goligher’s work serves the important purpose of putting forth a basic rhetorical grammar surrounding the PAS-MAID conversation for Christians who have yet to consider some of the fundamental moral assumptions at play.  In this sense, he largely succeeds in providing a primer to those readers who might otherwise fall prey to the cultural avoidance of death which afflicts secular society and the Church alike.  By advocating for the intrinsic value of people and the consequent inherent goodness of their existence, the failure of personal autonomy as a sufficiently robust principle upon which to base decisions of life and death, and the quasi-religious reasoning endemic to most secular arguments in favor of PAS-MAID, Goligher equips his reader with crucial (if simple) foundations upon which to ground opposition. Nevertheless, even within his intentionally limited and circumscribed argument, there are key areas that would benefit from deeper consideration.
Radical Autonomy and the Challenge to the Moral Accessibility of a Universal Ethic
As Goligher explicates near the book’s introduction, his argument proceeds in a deductive fashion, as he intends to first delineate universally agreed upon principles surrounding the intrinsic goodness and value of human life, then to consider their implications for the moral permissibility of PAS/MAID, specifically.  He subsequently seeks to buttress these arguments by providing a Christian ethic grounded primarily on Scriptural references to creation, suffering, and the life of Christ that strengthen this vision of human worth that precludes intentional killing under any circumstances.
While Goligher’s move to proceed from “basic moral starting points that nearly everyone accepts and shares,” is laudable and in some ways rhetorically crucial to arriving at a non-particularist ethic against the moral permissibility of PAS/MAID, it is worth asking whether such a starting point in fact exists in our current cultural milieu. Arguments for epistemological accessibility to a universal moral law have been taken up by such diverse thinkers as Plato, Aquinas, Kant, and C. S. Lewis and do indeed serve for many as the fulcrum upon which considerations of weighty questions like the permissibility of PAS/MAID rest.  Yet does such a universalist ethic recognizing the intrinsic and unconditional worth of human life truly hold water among those in a society such as our own today? The hegemony of autonomy calls this assumption into question.
While respect for autonomy as a guiding principle within bioethics (and culturally writ large) serves as a popular focus of criticism among conservative ethicists, it may nevertheless seem strange to consider autonomy as potentially subverting an argument for the intrinsic goodness of people. But when a healthy recognition of the importance of self-sovereignty mutates into what has been termed “radical autonomy,” in which the ability to self-determine one’s truth and goodness replaces the true and good as the highest good, then calculations of worth (particularly those of self-worth) are rendered contingent and subjective rather than absolute and objective. Goligher himself argues as much, when he later notes that an over-emphasis upon the centrality of autonomy affords the individual the ability to self-denigrate and (falsely) appraise his or her own life as not worth living.
The cultural grip that radical autonomy holds calls into question Goligher’s starting premise, that human life is indeed viewed by all as not only good, but unconditionally valuable. Insofar as individuals can misunderstand or even reject their own intrinsic goodness and worth, a shared ethic of the foundational goodness of human life cannot be assumed.
If the radical autonomy of the individual cannot serve as this reliable basis for unconditional worth, where are we to find such a foundation?
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