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IMAGINE BEING ASKED to give an account of the existence of your own life. You could say that you exist because your mother gave birth to you, and that she [...]

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable By Amitav Ghosh University of Chicago Press, 176 pp., $14.98 paperback BY CENTURY'S END, Miami win have disappeared. Think about that for [...]

HEALING IS ABOUT more than a well-functioning body. As important as it is, an individual, functioning body is only the visible tip of the much deeper phenomenon of health. The [...]

IT HAD BEEN another tough day. When Matthew arrived at his office he opened an e-mall that turned his day upside down. Thinking he was going to put the finishing [...]

CHRISTIANS HAVE come lately and weakly to the causes of environmental healing and restoration. When environmental activists in the 1960s noted that Christianity bore a major responsibility for our environmental [...]

Have you ever wondered how Adam got his name? Given all the possibilities, and the obvious importance of naming, we need to know why this particular name was given and [...]

Background: Despite the high risk for future fractures and the availability of effective treatments, fewer than 10% to 20% of patients who sustain a fragility fracture are tested or treated for osteoporosis. Objectives: To improve rates of testing and treatment for osteoporosis in patients with wrist fractures who are seen in the emergency department. Design: Nonrandomized, controlled trial with blinded ascertainment of outcomes. Setting: Emergency departments in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Patients: Persons 50 years of age or older who were treated for a wrist fracture and their physicians. Patients admitted to the hospital or treated for osteoporosis were excluded. Overall, 572 consecutive patients with fractures were screened, and 102 patients (55 intervention, 47 control) and 101 physicians were studied. Measurements: The primary end point was the prescription of osteoporosis treatment 6 months after fracture. Secondary end points included rates of testing for bone mineral density and patients' knowledge, satisfaction, and quality of life. Intervention: Faxed physician reminders that contained osteoporosis treatment guidelines endorsed by local opinion leaders and patient education. Control patients received usual care and information about falls and home safety. Results: The median patient age was 66 years. Most patients were female (78%) and white (79%); 70% of patients reported a previous fracture, and 22% had a fall with injury in the previous year. The intervention increased the rates of testing for bone mineral density to 62% (vs. 17% for controls; adjusted relative increase, 3.6 [P < 0.001]) and the rates of osteoporosis treatment to 40% (vs. 10% for controls; adjusted relative increase, 3.8 [P = 0.002]) within 6 months of fracture. Intervention patients were more likely to report a diagnosis of osteoporosis, but other patient-reported outcomes did not differ significantly between groups. Limitations: This was a small, nonrandomized, controlled study with process-based outcomes. Conclusions: In a multifaceted intervention directed at patients and their physicians, the rates of testing and treatment for osteoporosis after emergency department care for a fragility fracture were more than 3 times those of controls.

The article reflects on creation of the world and all its life by God, which was adapted from the book "This Sacred Life: Humanity's Place in a Wounded World," by Norman Wirzba. Topics discussed include Christians' affirmation that creation is ex nihilo, the notion that creatures are the embodied sites through which the love of God is continuously at work, and Christians' belief about the life of Jesus Christ.

Thanks to writers like Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan, people are learning that eating is an agricultural act. Of course, it is also more than that: the moment any one [...]

WHAT IF ONE of the most compelling responses to the overabundance of carbon in the atmosphere is to restore the carbon in the ground beneath our feet? And what if [...]

Access to essential medications and health products is critical to effective management of kidney disease. Using data from the ISN Global Kidney Health Atlas multinational cross-sectional survey, global access of patients with kidney disease to essential medications and health products was examined. Overall, 125 countries participated, with 118 countries, composing 91.5% of the world’s population, providing data on this domain. Most countries were unable to access eGFR and albuminuria in their primary care settings. Only one-third of low-income countries (LICs) were able to measure serum creatinine and none were able to access eGFR or quantify proteinuria. The ability to monitor diabetes mellitus through serum glucose and glycated hemoglobin measurements was suboptimal. Pathology services were rarely available in tertiary care in LICs (12%) and lower middle-income countries (45%). While acute and chronic hemodialysis services were available in almost all countries, acute and chronic peritoneal dialysis services were rarely available in LICs (18% and 29%, respectively). Kidney transplantation was available in 79% of countries overall and in 12% of LICs. While over one-half of all countries publicly funded RRT and kidney medications with or without copayment, this was less common in LICs and lower middle-income countries. In conclusion, this study demonstrated significant gaps in services for kidney care and funding that were most apparent in LICs and lower middle-income countries.

An international survey led by the International Society of Nephrology in 2016 assessed the current capacity of kidney care worldwide. To better understand how governance and leadership guide kidney care, items pertinent to government priority, advocacy, and guidelines, among others, were examined. Of the 116 responding countries, 36% (n = 42) reported CKD as a government health care priority, which was associated with having an advocacy group (χ2 = 11.57; P = 0.001). Nearly one-half (42%; 49 of 116) of countries reported an advocacy group for CKD, compared with only 19% (21 of 112) for AKI. Over one-half (59%; 68 of 116) of countries had a noncommunicable disease strategy. Similarly, 44% (48 of 109), 55% (57 of 104), and 47% (47 of 101) of countries had a strategy for nondialysis CKD, chronic dialysis, and kidney transplantation, respectively. Nearly one-half (49%; 57 of 116) reported a strategy for AKI. Most countries (79%; 92 of 116) had access to CKD guidelines and just over one-half (53%; 61 of 116) reported guidelines for AKI. Awareness and adoption of guidelines were low among nonnephrologist physicians. Identified barriers to kidney care were factors related to patients, such as knowledge and attitude (91%; 100 of 110), physicians (84%; 92 of 110), and geography (74%; 81 of 110). Specific to renal replacement therapy, patients and geography were similarly identified as a barrier in 78% (90 of 116) and 71% (82 of 116) of countries, respectively, with the addition of nephrologists (72%; 83 of 116) and the health care system (73%; 85 of 116). These findings inform how kidney care is currently governed globally. Ensuring that guidelines are feasible and distributed appropriately is important to enhancing their adoption, particularly in primary care. Furthermore, increasing advocacy and government priority, especially for AKI, may increase awareness and strategies to better guide kidney care.

In August 2004, a massive boulder loosened by mining blasts rolled down a Virginia hillside, crushing to death the sleeping three-year-old Jeremy Davidson. In the spring of 2000, soon-to-be college [...]

In this essay, I present eating as a vital theological concern and an integral part of the church’s ministries and mission in the world. I argue that food is not reducible to the status of a commodity but is instead God’s love made delectable. The production and the sharing of good food is a witness to God’s presence among us.

There appears to be a law that when creatures have reached the level of consciousness, as men have, they must become conscious of the creation; they must learn how they fit into it and what its needs are and what it requires of them, or else pay a terrible penalty: the spirit of the creation will go out of them, and they will become destructive; the very earth will depart from them and go where they cannot follow.1Human beings have lost their creaturely nature; this has been corrupted by their being sicut deus [like god]. The whole created world is now covered in a veil; it is silent and lacking explanation, opaque and enigmatic.2

The article presents the author's reflections on the connections between Christian life and food and eating habits in the United States. Introductory details are given noting the high economic and ecological cost of the food and grocery industries of the U.S. in the 21st century, despite low commodity prices. Questions are then issued asking how Christians can be more conscientious in their food consumption. Metaphors and parallels are also drawn between food habits and the Eucharist service.

This essay argues that a good and faithful agriculture, and the healthy eating practices made possible by it, should play a vital role in the healing of creation. The interconnectedness of ecological problems means that if we get our eating right, much other environmental good will follow. What good eating and good agriculture look like are developed in terms of God's own example as the One who plants and gardens the world. Today's industrial agriculture and our culture's obsession with cheap and convenient food are shown to lie behind much of the world's degradation and economic injustice. I suggest that Christians can play an important role in the healing and celebration of creation by participating in God's caring, gardening ways with the world, and that we can do this most effectively in the eating we choose to do. Churches should take a leading role in the promotion of a God-honoring agriculture and in the advocacy of economic and political priorities that serve the well being of all creation's eaters.

The article discusses the "Sunshine economy" movement. Comments are given criticizing the food and agricultural infrastructure of the U.S. as it is linked with fossil fuels. The author asserts that the U.S. must develop a more local and less oil-dependent economy for food production and consumption. Several suggestions and guidelines to develop more sustainable agricultural and commercial habits are given.

Focuses on Sabbath sensibility in life. Overview of a Sabbath practice at the Mennonite and Baptist farming community in Alberta; Views on Sabbath from an economic standpoint; Benefits of the Sabbath for families.

QCD superconductors in the color–flavor-locked (CFL) phase support excitations (generalized mesons) that can be described as pairs of particles or holes (rather than particle–hole) around a gapped Fermi surface. In weak coupling and to leading logarithm accuracy the scalar and pseudoscalar excitations are massless and the vector and axial-vector excitations are massive and degenerate. The massless scalar excitations are combined with the longitudinal gluons leading to the Meissner effect in the CFL phase. The mass of the composite vector excitations is close to twice the gap in weak coupling, but goes asymptotically to zero with increasing coupling thereby realizing Georgi's vector limit in cold and dense matter. We discuss the possible mixing of the composite scalar and vector excitations with the gluons, their possible coupling to the modified photons and their decay into light pseudoscalars in the CFL phase. The issue of hidden gauge-symmetry in the QCD superconductor is critically examined. The physical implications of our results on soft dilepton and neutrino emission in cold and dense matter are briefly discussed.

We show that color can leak from a QCD bag if we allow for pseudoscalar isoscalar singlet (η′) coupling at the surface. To enforce total confinement of color an additional boundary term is suggested. New relations between the η′ mass and decay constant and the QCD gluon condensates are derived and compared with the empirical parameters.

Most discussions of chaotic scattering systems are devoted to two-dimensional systems. It is of considerable interest to extend these studies to the, in general, more realistic case of three dimensions. In this context, it is conceptually important to investigate the quality of semiclassical methods as a function of the dimensionality. As a model system, we choose various three-dimensional generalizations of the famous three-disk problem which played a central role in the study of chaotic scattering in two dimensions. We present a quantum-mechanical treatment of the hyperbolic scattering of a point particle off a finite number of nonoverlapping and nontouching hard spheres in three dimensions. We derive expressions for the scattering matrixSand its determinant. The determinant ofSdecomposes into two parts, the first one contains the product of the determinants of the individual one-sphereS-matrices and the second one is given by a ratio involving the determinants of a characteristic KKR-type matrix and its conjugate. We justify our approach by showing that all formal manipulations in these derivations are correct and that all the determinants involved which are of infinite dimension exist. Moreover, for all complex wave numbers, we conjecture a direct link between the quantum-mechanical and semiclassical descriptions: The semiclassical limit of the cumulant expansion of the KKR-type matrix is given by the Gutzwiller–Voros zeta function plus diffractional corrections in the curvature expansion. This connection is direct since it is not based on any kind of subtraction scheme involving bounded reference systems. We present numerically computed resonances and compare them with the corresponding data for the similar two-dimensionalN-disk systems and with semiclassical calculations.