Jeanie Hannaman

By Julia Smucker, LifeNews - Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas once wrote, “My Uncle Charlie is not much of a person but he is still my Uncle Charlie.”... This striking sentence introduced his argument on the limits of “personhood” language in medical contexts. Yet it also captures the power of having known a human being as a person, a subjective but universal human experience that belies attempts to categorize certain humans as nonpersons... It’s subjective not in the sense of being a mere matter of personal opinion, but of being rooted in personal experience (the experience of the subject). In Hauerwas’ example, I’ve experienced Uncle Charlie as a person because I’ve known him as a human individual with a name, a relationship to me, and human traits specific to him, and no ethical or philosophical abstraction can undo this.