The Report: Many Voices in Conversation

Abstract

The Report: Many Voices in Conversation Let us reassure you that despite appearances, you are indeed reading the Hastings Center Report. While we'll accept full responsibility, praise, or blame, for the cover design, we want to reflect briefly on what the Report is and should be, and how you, our readers and authors, can help us shape the content between the covers. Shortly after the Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences was established, the Hastings Center Report was born in 1971 as a modest newsletter of twelve pages. The Report's goal of informing and educating a broad audience to issues was subsequently complemented by substantial scholarly articles and essays contained in the Hastings Center Studies. The marriage of the Institute's two publications in 1975 was in part one of convenience, but also grew out of a sense that and bioethics were becoming increasingly separated, and that a journal that was both intellectually rigorous and generally accessible would merge the audiences and invigorate the discourse. In the intervening years, the Report has walked the fine line between serious scholarly journal with articles that challenge the finest of professionals, and popular magazine with features adaptable for use even in high school settings. Our acute editorial challenge is to maintain this balance in a way that invites professionalism and innovation by authors and engages the moral reflection and imagination of readers. As well, the Report aspires to be a public forum for the many professions and disciplines that contribute to bioethics - medicine, law, philosophy, the natural and social sciences, theology - to engage in mutually enriching interdisciplinary conversation on common ground. Our editorial horizons must remain sufficiently broad to guarantee a place in our pages for many voices, lest bioethics become a closed, self-engrossed, and narrow enterprise. Joining many diverse voices on issues that are both profound and personal in an ongoing conversation that is open, full of vitality, and engaging, is not an impossible ideal, but we do require your help. We need the voices of the best of professional academic scholars who bring their critical and analytical skills to bear on questions that transcend disciplinary boundaries. We need also the voices of emerging, younger scholars who in years to come will carry forward the foundational work of the Daniel Callahans and Willard Gaylins, the Robert Morisons and Leon Kasses, the Paul Ramseys and Hans Jonases. …