Today I wanted to share with you an adapted excerpt from the foreword, which was written by Andy Crouch, the executive editor of Christianity Today.
Perhaps this might even inspire you to read the book for yourself. My review comes on Tuesday.
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"Perhaps once a year, if I’m lucky, I encounter a book that addresses a supremely important topic and does so in a supremely helpful way. Dr. Bob Cutillo’s Pursuing Health in an Anxious Age is such a book.What are we to do with our bodies, fearfully and wonderfully made as they are, in times of illness, vulnerability, and death? That question has always been with us. But it’s becoming especially urgent for the citizens of the technological world—or, more baldly put, subjects of the technological empire—that holds out to us a vision of the good life buttressed by scientific knowledge but also demands from us ever more loyalty and obedience.
As a citizen of that empire, it feels almost subversive to observe that there’s something uniquely tragic about our age of modern medicine—tragic in the old sense of genuine greatness and good intentions turned awry by a fatal flaw.
In so many ways, medicine has delivered real cures and relief of suffering. It’s likely that I’m here to write this foreword, 48 years into my mortal life, only because of the direct and indirect contributions of medicine, starting with the vaccines that warded off many a childhood illness, the antibiotics that effortlessly cured many another, the anesthesia that has made minor but essential surgeries possible, and the more mundane benefits of dentistry and ophthalmology, just to name a few. And for the most part, the human beings who’ve prescribed and delivered these treatments have been people of intelligence, wisdom, patience, and kindness—bearers of the imago Dei at their best.
Yet in so many other ways, medicine falls ever short of our expectations that it’ll deliver us from the basic human condition, the morbidity and mortality that are our inheritance as fallen creatures."