Biology and health inequality.

Intriguing parallels between civil servant and nonhuman primate hierarchies suggest that highly stratified societies foster health inequalities. Determining how social differences translate into chronic disease remains a challenge, but neuroendocrine pathways appear to play a role

Why do people with mental distress have poor social outcomes? Four lessons from the capabilities approach

Macro level data indicate that people experiencing mental distress experience poor health, social and economic outcomes. The sociology of mental health has a series of dominant competing explanations of the mechanisms at personal, social and structural levels that generate these poor outcomes. This article explains the limitations of these approaches and takes up the challenge of Hopper (2007) who in this journal proposed the capabilities approach as a means of normatively reconceptualising the experiences of people with mental distress, with a renewed focus on agency, equality and genuine opportunity. Using an innovative methodology to operationalise the capabilities approach, findings from an in-depth qualitative study exploring the lived experiences of twenty-two people with recent inpatient experience of psychiatric units in Scotland are presented. The paper demonstrates that the capabilities approach can be applied to reconceptualise how unjust social outcomes happen for this social group. It distinguishes how the results of using a capabilities approach to analysis are distinct from established dominant analytical frameworks through four added features: a focus on actual lived outcomes; the role of capabilities as well as functionings; being normative; and incorporating agency. The capabilities approach is found to be an operationalisable framework; the findings have implications for professionals and systems in the specific context of mental health; and the capabilities approach offers a fertile basis for normative studies in wider aspects of health and wellbeing

Using Hybrid Effectively in Christian Higher Education

Hybrid is just one of a number of terms used for the convergence of face-to-face and online learning, At the University of Central Florida (UCF) they are called mixed mode courses, In the corporate world the most common language used for hybrid is blended learning, Blended learning, says Bob Mosher, is about using multiple learning modalities, which include, but are not limited to, the Web.7 The blended learning term is also being used more frequently within academic circles,8 Because of the inconsistency in how blended learning is employed, though, and because our goal is not to describe learning in general but to focus on individual courses, this article will use the term hybrid and will apply it more narrowly to mean a course in which face-to-face and online learning are integrated in such a way that the seat time of the course is reduced

Evangelicals and Roman Catholic Spirituality

After almost twenty-five years of teaching at an evangelical seminary in the Pacific Northwest I am seeing an emerging interest in and hunger for Catholic spirituality and mysticism among many of our students, both at the master’s and doctor of ministry levels. It is exciting to see spirituality as a conduit for Roman Catholic – Evangelical ecumenism and dialogue

Luther’s Mysticism, Pietism, and Contemplative Spirituality

To ask, “Why church?” certainly stirs multilayered theological, missional, ecclesial, and pastoral reflection. The question also has spiritual ramifications. To explore some of them, we will trace a thread of the Lutheran spiritual tradition from Martin Luther’s own “faith mysticism” through particular aspects of German pietism. That overview will provide a foundation for engaging the contemporary contemplative movement, in order to discern how its concepts and practices might provide insight for the practice of spirituality. Our conviction is that deepening the interior journey through a living, active faith leads not to withdrawal but to an awareness—even a vulnerability—that welcomes a healthy struggle with the realities of our world

Collaboration and Conflict in Europe around the Early Tranquebar Mission

Some 300 years ago, on July 9,1706, a new epoch in Protestantism began when Bartholomew Ziegenbaig and Heinrich Plütschau landed as missionaries at Tranquebar on the eastern coast of southern India. This mission, though not as well known as later Moravian Brethren missionary efforts or William Carey’s momentous journey, must be regarded as the first on-going Protestant foreign mission work.^ The cooperative nature of this endeavor throughout much of the eighteenth century has frequently been noted^ and stands in stark contrast to the more insular character of missions in the nineteenth century. It is the story of how an Anglican voluntary society in England supported a Royal Danish Mission in the sending of Lutheran missionaries from the Pietist center of Halle to Tranquebar

Attractor Flows from Defect Lines

Deforming a two dimensional conformal field theory on one side of a trivial defect line gives rise to a defect separating the original theory from its deformation. The Casimir force between these defects and other defect lines or boundaries is used to construct flows on bulk moduli spaces of CFTs. It turns out, that these flows are constant reparametrizations of gradient flows of the g-functions of the chosen defect or boundary condition. The special flows associated to supersymmetric boundary conditions in N=(2,2) superconformal field theories agree with the attractor flows studied in the context of black holes in N=2 supergravity.Comment: 28 page

Bell nonlocality and Bayesian game theory

We discuss a connection between Bell nonlocality and Bayesian games. This link offers interesting perspectives for Bayesian games, namely to allow the players to receive advice in the form of nonlocal correlations, for instance using entangled quantum particles or more general no-signaling boxes. The possibility of having such 'nonlocal advice' will lead to novel joint strategies, impossible to achieve in the classical setting. This implies that quantum resources, or more general no-signaling resources, offer a genuine advantage over classical ones. Moreover, some of these strategies can represent equilibrium points, leading to the notion of quantum/no-signaling Nash equilibrium. Finally we describe new types of question in the study of nonlocality, namely the consideration of non-local advantage when there is a set of Bell expressions.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure