In this paper, we use an innovative, empirical, and-as yet-rarely applied method in bioethics, namely corpus analysis, which is commonly used in literature studies (Moretti 2013), linguistics (Baker 2006), and has been recently discussed in the context of the history of ideas (Betti and van den Berg 2016) and philosophy of science (Pence and Ramsey 2018).1 In contrast to other areas of experimental philosophy, which typically involve surveying folk participants with questionnaires aimed at eliciting their intuitions, our method here connects distant reading (a quantitative approach to the large corpus within Christian bioethics) with close reading (qualitative analysis of selected documents or their fragments with the word "dignity") of scholarly papers. By demonstrating the ambiguity of the concept of dignity discernible when analyzing its use in normative contexts, our work is a novel contribution to the debates among the historians of ideas about conceptual identity and conceptual drift.