A Thousand Streams and Groves: Comments on Dr. Gierycz's Paper "United in Diversity." European Diversity and Autonomy Papers. EDAP 3/2008

Gierycz argues provocatively in his paper that the identity of the European Union as reflected in its motto, “United in Diversity,” has been “derived” from the model offered by the Roman Catholic Church. His argument, however, is flawed in a number of key respects. Among other things, he ignores entirely the fact that the Catholic Church did not invent the wheel in this respect but modeled itself in turn on the earlier example of the Roman Empire. The impression he leaves of the ways in which the Church went about imposing its version of “unity in diversity” on the local cultures over which it came to exercise dominion, moreover, is highly misleading. A third problem is that he treats the terms “Catholic Church” and “Christian thought” as if they were interchangeable when their references are obviously not necessarily identical. There are also deep problems with Gierycz’s attempt to establish that Church–based moral norms are superior to those reflected in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights because, as he seeks to convince us, the former are grounded on the “rock” of “absolute” values while the latter are built upon the “sand” of shifting sociological opinion. These flaws diminish the value of what could have been an important contribution to our understanding of the extent to which the European Union should look to the experience of the Church in seeking to establish its own identity as a supranational institution “united in diversity.

Effective lifestyle interventions to improve type II diabetes self-management for those with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder: a systematic review

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The prevalence of type II diabetes among individuals suffering from schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorders is more than double that of the general population. By 2005, North American professional medical associations of Psychiatry, Diabetes, and Endocrinology responded by recommending continuous metabolic monitoring for this population to control complications from obesity and diabetes. However, these recommendations do not identify the types of effective treatment for people with schizophrenia who have type II diabetes. To fill this gap, this systematic evidence review identifies effective lifestyle interventions that enhance quality care in individuals who are suffering from type II diabetes and schizophrenia or other schizoaffective disorders.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A systematic search from Medline, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and ISI Web of Science was conducted. Of the 1810 unique papers that were retrieved, four met the inclusion/exclusion criteria and were analyzed.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The results indicate that diabetes education is effective when it incorporates diet and exercise components, while using a design that addresses challenges such as cognition, motivation, and weight gain that may result from antipsychotics.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This paper begins to point to effective interventions that will improve type II diabetes management for people with schizophrenia or other schizoaffective disorders.</p

COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and hesitancy in low- and middle-income countries

Widespread acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines is crucial for achieving sufficient immunization coverage to end the global pandemic, yet few studies have investigated COVID-19 vaccination attitudes in lower-income countries, where large-scale vaccination is just beginning. We analyze COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across 15 survey samples covering 10 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa and South America, Russia (an upper-middle-income country) and the United States, including a total of 44,260 individuals. We find considerably higher willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine in our LMIC samples (mean 80.3%; median 78%; range 30.1 percentage points) compared with the United States (mean 64.6%) and Russia (mean 30.4%). Vaccine acceptance in LMICs is primarily explained by an interest in personal protection against COVID-19, while concern about side effects is the most common reason for hesitancy. Health workers are the most trusted sources of guidance about COVID-19 vaccines. Evidence from this sample of LMICs suggests that prioritizing vaccine distribution to the Global South should yield high returns in advancing global immunization coverage. Vaccination campaigns should focus on translating the high levels of stated acceptance into actual uptake. Messages highlighting vaccine efficacy and safety, delivered by healthcare workers, could be effective for addressing any remaining hesitancy in the analyzed LMICs.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Uneasy Burden: What it Really Means to Learn to Think like a Lawyer

If you think you can think about a thing that is hitched to other things without thinking about the things that it is hitched to, then you have [learned to think like a lawyer]. Thomas Reed Powell It imposes the uneasy burden and occasional joy of a complex double vision, a fluid, ambivalent response to men and events which represents, at its finest, a profoundly civilized adjustment to the cost of being human in this modern world. Ralph Ellison I first met Jim Elkins in the summer of 1979 when we were fellows together in a Law and Humanities program under the direction of Professor James White at the University of Chicago. Together with eight other law professors from around the country, we spent six weeks reading and discussing the great classics of Western literature: Homer\u27s Iliad, Thucydides\u27 History of the Pelopennesian War, Plato\u27s Gorgias, Gibbon\u27s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Swift\u27s Tale of a Tub, Burke\u27s Reflections, and Austen\u27s Emma. I do not think I am speaking out of turn when I say that, not just for me, but for all of us, it was one of the most profound educational experiences of our lives. Often after our daily discussion sessions, Jim and I would go out for a run along the shore of Lake Michigan. I remember one afternoon in particular when we ran for miles along the lakefront. It was one of those picture-perfect Chicago summer days: families with picnic blankets spread out on the grass, kids flying brightly colored kites, dogs chasing frisbees, the smell of barbecued chicken in the air, a gentle cooling breeze blowing in off the lake, sunlight glittering on the water. In our session that morning, we had just finished Thucydides\u27 History and tomorrow we were starting into Plato\u27s Gorgias. As we were running along, I confided to Jim that I had always had difficulty reading the Platonic dialogues. I had never been able to understand what it was that people found so attractive about Socrates. The Socrates who appeared in the dialogues struck me as something of an intellectual bully. Moreover, there was something about the quality of argument in the dialogues that I found deeply dissatisfying. It proceeded at such a level of abstraction that it often seemed to me to be either platitudinous or circular. How could anyone disagree with the proposition that the good is better than the bad? In response, Jim told me about a book he had read that had a profound impact on his life, a book he had come back to again and again in the early days of his own law teaching: Robert Pirsig\u27s Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book was about teaching and rhetoric and living one\u27s life, but it was also, he told me, about reading Plato. The narrator of Pirsig\u27s novel too, apparently, had been put off by Plato\u27s Socrates, by his ruthlessly dissecting intelligence. In part, the book was about his coming to terms with that, about defining his own relationship to whatever it was that Socrates represented. Sensing that Pirsig\u27s book might strike a responsive chord in me as well, Jim urged me to read it