Andrew Dutney

In Australia, you don't write books on religion or ethics for a living. It's something that gets squeezed in around your 'day job' — evenings, weekends, and annual leave. Sometimes the writing can be a valid extension of your daily work, as it has been in my case. But work still comes first. So let me begin telling you about my new book by first telling you about my job.

I'm a minister in the Uniting Church in Australia. After pastoral ministries in Scotland and Sydney, for the last thirteen years I've served the church as a teacher of historical theology and ethics. I've loved this. Teaching is a true joy. Recently I was appointed as Principal of Parkin-Wesley College, the Uniting Church's theological college in South Australia. So now there'll be less teaching and more time given to administration. But that's alright. Administration is something that I find to be a wonderfully collaborative and pastoral activity. There are other roles within my job too. I'm a senior lecturer at Flinders University and also the Director of the Flinders University and Adelaide College of Divinity Centre for Theology, Science and Culture. As part of my ministry within the wider community I'm a member of several bioethics committees and the Chairperson of the South Australian Council on Reproductive Technology, the statutory authority in this area of medicine and research. Because of these involvements journalists often call upon me to comment on issues in bioethics and religion — as often as not because the church, University, or Department of Human Services refers them to me. Apparently I'm an 'expert'.

And this brings me to my new book, Playing God. It's not as if I was looking for something to do with all my spare time. I had to make the time to get pen to paper (with a great deal of help from my partner, Heather, who is a brilliant time manager). It was difficult, but there was something I wanted to say:

I'm only an expert. Experts have experienced and know some things and that could be relevant to the kind of moral and spiritual issues that are emerging today. But the simple fact is that new questions are emerging that have no answers. Not even experts can do anything about that. Yet as the questions get harder, more and more experts are being lined up in the hope that they can get us off the moral hook. It's not experts that we need just now, but more opportunities to talk together as ordinary people and share the experiences and insights that we are beginning to accumulate in these strange times. So I wrote the book in part to expose the illusion of the 'expert' and in part to get the conversation going in some fresh directions.

I had another agenda in Playing God too. People have to make impossible decisions all the time — life and death decisions about themselves or their loved ones. It's one of the by products of the biotechnology revolution that we hear so much about these days. And, in my experience, the vast majority of people make excellent bioethical decisions. They may be amateur, but time and time again they show themselves to be the true experts in managing the agonising moral decisions that they now have to make. In this new book I wanted to honour the bioethicist-in-the-street, who has been working through impossibly tough decisions about life and death — without any experts to come to his or her rescue.

So in Playing God I have taken a journey into the nature and experience of moral existence in the age of biotechnology, sharing some things that I know, some insights that I've gleaned and some stories that I've heard. It is my hope that readers of my book will recognise the relevance of their own stories and insights, and be encouraged to contribute to the bioethical conversations that are now going on throughout society from their wisdom.