Improving Transgender Healthcare Experiences Using Photovoice

The transgender community is one of many marginalized populations. There are a variety of factors that influence the healthcare experiences and quality of care that members of the community receive. Some aspects of the difficulties experienced are widespread and not limited to transgender individuals while others are exclusively experienced by transgender patients related to their unique needs. Transgender patients agree that issues identified by providers, like access to insurance and lack of protocols and provider education, are indeed barriers. However, transgender patients have identified other issues, like stigma and discrimination, to be more significant barriers to their accessing healthcare. Additionally, barriers identified by providers effect transgender patients in a manner that most providers would never normally consider as cis-gender individuals. This study gathers data sourced directly from members of the transgender community to better understand the healthcare experiences and needs of transgender patients. Findings show barriers to transgender healthcare to be multifaceted and complex. Providers who are cis-gender and have not personally experienced the daily rigors that are typical for members of the transgender community cannot begin to understand the needs of the community without context and education directly informed by transgender individuals

Arms Control as Uncertainty Management

For decades or longer, policy-makers have sought to use arms control to reduce the uncertainty endemic to the international security environment. Because uncertainty is pervasive in these situations, however, practitioners themselves are naturally vulnerable to its effects. This paper seeks to help policy-makers optimize arms control outcomes by providing improved theory and best practices for goal-setting and strategy selection using the judicious application of decision theoretic concepts. The paper first lays out a suitable role for decision theory in the study and analysis of arms control, arguing that “uncertainty” is a more appropriate concept for description and analysis here than is “risk.” Prior approaches that rely on “risk” have tended to drive the search for arms control best practices, but “risk” requires the use of probability estimates that are frequently not available or not a good indicator of potential outcomes. Second, the paper argues that decision-makers are vulnerable to the effects of missing information and the uncertainty it causes in the run-up to and during arms control negotiations. Consequently, they are subject to biases and resort to the use of security-specific heuristics, including worst-case scenario thinking, limited-theater-of-war thinking, and low-dimension (or non-complex) thinking when setting goals and employing strategies for negotiating arms control agreements. The paper discusses the origins of this uncertainty and the strategies that states could employ as a result of these security-specific heuristics, arguing that they can best be grouped into two types—risk reduction versus uncertainty management. Finally, the paper makes recommendations for optimizing outcomes—for getting efficient negotiations that result in robust, durable agreements, capable of managing uncertainty about security, despite the effects of missing information

Book Review: Lee Palmer Wandel, ed. A Companion to the Eucharist in the Reformation.

The Protestant Reformation may have begun with a controversy over indulgences, but as the sixteenth century wore on, it was disagreement over the Eucharist that made divisions among Christians most visible. This volume provides an introduction to competing understandings of the Eucharist and the consequences for liturgical practice and the arts extending into the eighteenth century. It is self-consciously interdisciplinary, with contributions by theologians, historians, art historians, musicologists, and literary scholars. The volume invites comparison among the Christian traditions, with articles devoted not only to the Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed churches, but also to Anglicans and Anabaptists. The most traditional part of the book is the first section, devoted to theology. Gary Macy ably sums up the medieval inheritance, while John D. Rempel, James F. Turrell, and Robert J. Daly, SJ, describe Anabaptist, Anglican, and Catholic theologies, respectively. Because they discuss a number of thinkers, these authors can convey the variation within each confessional position. In contrast, the Lutheran Church is represented only by an essay on Martin Luther (Volker Leppin); there is no mention of Philipp Melanchthon or of the struggles among Lutherans as they tried to reconcile the theological legacy of the two Wittenbergers and that eventually led to the confessional position contained in the Book of Concord. The Reformed church is more fully represented by essays on Zwingli and Bullinger (Carrie Euler), Martin Bucer (Nicholas Thompson), and John Calvin (Nicholas Wolterstorff), but aside from a few references to the Consensus Tigurinus and the Second Helvetic Confession, there is also little sense of how a relatively unified Reformed position was articulated in polemical debate with Lutherans and Catholics through the later sixteenth century

Review of \u3ci\u3eJohannes Bugenhagen. Selected Writings,\u3c/i\u3e introduced and translated by Kurt K. Hendel

Johannes Bugenhagen is the third man of the Wittenberg Reformation, far less familiar to most people than Martin Luther or Philipp Melanchthon. Yet Bugenhagen was an influential reformer in his own right, influencing the shape of Lutheranism not only through his theological and pastoral works but also through his church ordinances, which institutionalized the Lutheran Reformation throughout northern Germany. As pastor of Wittenberg’s parish church, he was Luther’s spiritual advisor, while as a member of the theology faculty he helped train a generation of Lutheran pastors. Kurt Hendel, the Bernard, Fisher, Westburg Distinguished Professor of Reformation History at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, has translated a selection of works by Bugenhagen in order to introduce Luther’s close friend to an English-speaking audience. His endeavors are certainly to be welcomed, even if the volumes themselves could have benefited from a stronger editorial presence. ... The Selected Writings is the easiest way for English-speaking readers to become acquainted with the career and thought of this influential Wittenberg reformer

Review of \u3ci\u3eChurch robbers and reformers in Germany, 1525-1547. Confiscation and religious purpose in the Holy Roman Empire.\u3c/i\u3e by Christopher Ocker.

This study is valuable not only as an overview in English of a very complicated area of ecclesiastical law which had significant economic ramifications, but also for its implications for understanding the rise of the territorial state in early modern Germany