Across the last twenty-five years, writers in the field of bioethics have concentrated chiefly on moral dilemmas that beset practitioners. They have appealed to rules and principles that will help to solve or resolve such quandaries. This caseoriented, problem-solving view of ethics fits smoothly into the curriculum of medical schools and teaching hospitals, since medical education already focuses on cases. Moralists, operating in this mode, have produced impressive work on confidentiality, truth-telling, conflict of interest, experimentation on human subjects, pulling the plug, and the like. However, this principled, problem-solving approach has not offered as much insight into those ordeals confronting patients (and sometimes practitioners) that do not wholly admit of solution. T.S. Eliot once distinguished between two types of moral problems: those relatively technical and pragmatic problems for which the appropriate question is, What are we going to do about it? and those deeper spiritual problems that no specific policy or strategy will dissolve, for which the appropriate question is, How does one behave toward it? Such problems must be faced rather than solved. These deeper moral demands beset us in the mystery of birth, in chronic affliction, after the heart attack and the stroke, and in the ordeal of fading powers and death. could do nothing about the death of my husband, the wife of a college president once said to me. chief question was whether I could rise to the occasion. With one stroke, his death altered her daily life and intimacy and transformed her from a person with a clear-cut public role in the college to a superfluity. How could she rise to an occasion that redefined her identity? Moral reflection about such events does not simply trace back to a brace of sometimes conflicting principles; it forces meditation on the human condition; it probes one's deepest convictions; it may even unsettle one's habits; it asks of the agent the mobilization of resources, some of them already in place but untested; others, as yet, unbidden. I suspect that the planners for this twenty-fifth anniversary of The Hastings Center had in mind this second range of problems when they included at this celebration a panel on Spirit, Emotion, and Meaning. Their decision suggests that these wider approaches--variously literary, phenomenological, metaphysical, theological, historical, psychological, and sociological--belong in the total mix of disciplines bearing on the field of bioethics if one wishes to explore the field to a depth of at least six feet. This broader examination may yield important results not simply for patients tested by ordeal but also for practitioners, redefining and illuminating for them the quandaries they face. …