Digital Divide Magnified for Older Veterans Living Off the Grid

Compared to urban Veterans, rural Veterans are more likely to be older (55-74), not employed, have less education, more service-related disabilities and unmet healthcare needs. Interviews with a national sample of community-based outpatient clinic providers described highly-rural Veterans who are “off the grid.” These Veterans, by choice and/or circumstance, do not have access to reliable internet, associated devices or knowledge/skills. Providers described the difficulties of connecting with these Veterans even by phone. The healthcare shift to virtual telehealth modalities in response to COVID-19 highlights the digital divide as a social determinant of health. For “off-the-grid” Veterans, past experiences and present-day circumstances converge to perpetuate and exacerbate inequalities in accessing healthcare. Their situation underscores that telehealth is not a panacea for increasing access to care and confronts us with the moral imperative to reach those with whom it may be most difficult to connect to span social, geographic and digital divides.

“Why did I not die in the womb?” Job’s cursing the day of his birth in the interpretations of Gregory the Great and Thomas Aquinas (a comparative approach)

The Book of Job presents a just, blameless man, who after being afflicted with great pain and suffering begins to curse the day of his birth. The aim of the article is to elucidate the reasons for and the meaning of Job’s harsh words by comparing two different interpretations of the passage offered by Gregory the Great and Thomas Aquinas. Both expositions seem to be incompatible regarding: the reasons for and the aims of Job’s cursing, the moral evaluation of his cursing, the reasons for and the objects of Job’s sorrow, the virtuous way of expressing sorrow. On the other hand, they seem compatible concerning the admission of the fact of experiencing sorrow by Job and the moral imperative to tame sorrow. The incompatibilities appear to be rooted in two different approaches to passions (the Stoic versus the Peripatetic one) and in different evaluations of earthly life and goods. It is shown that Aquinas’ interpretation is more faithful to the text and relies on a more adequate anthropology and psychology.

The Case for Co-production in Singapore's Mental Healthcare

For better or worse, there exists a power differential between psychiatrists and their patients in mental healthcare. Co-production was proposed to be the “third space” to offer truce between the professional-patient tension in mental healthcare. In Singapore, co-production is a new, but growing, approach to mental healthcare service delivery. In this commentary, we argue that co-production is not just a novel way to provide service, but a moral imperative. Recovery Colleges and its adoption in Singapore is discussed in some detail to highlight how co-production may be applied in practice.

International Scholarships and Southern Agency: An Ethnography of Alumni, Scholars, and Applicants

International scholarships are an established mode of aid distribution for many donor countries and a life-changing educational opportunity for recipients from the global South. This article draws upon ethnographic field research centred on Dili, Timor-Leste, focussing on case studies of a scholarship applicant, a scholar, and an alumnus. It employs the concept of Southern agency, investigating individual practices shaped by influences that both constrain and enable action, namely local infrastructure, family and kinship groups, literacies, and the colonial legacy. Scholarship places are limited and extremely competitive, while assigning a moral imperative for alumni to learn and return to contribute to local development, often resulting in the re-production of socially normed roles echoing the colonial era. The global upheaval in higher education resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic emphasises the need for alternative interventions in the global South, including greater investment in local higher education institutions, and online learning.

gendering of healthy diets

Gendered identities are communicated in places as frequent and ordinary as food packaging, becoming mundane features of everyday life as they sit on supermarket shelves, in cupboards and on office desks. Multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) allows us to investigate how such identities are buried in packaging in relation to health and fitness. Despite observed broader changes in gendered representations of the body in advertising, in particular relating to the arrival of ‘power femininity’, the products analysed in this article are found to carry fairly traditional and prototypical gender representations, and products marketed at both men and women highlight the need for more precise body management. For women, however, this precision is related to managing the demands of everyday life, packaged as a moral imperative to be healthy, responsible and successful.

Happiness Issue – Moral Aspects of its Biochemical Enhancement

The search for happiness is something that constitutes human existence from its beginning, and even though people have achieved unimaginable progress in science and technologies, they still have not found the secret of being happy. Transhumanist authors, headed by Mark Walker, believe we can reach happiness biochemically using specific drugs and without considerable side effects. They consider it to be our moral duty because it would increase the prosocial behaviour of people enhanced in that way, following research showing that the happier people are, the more useful it is for society. In this paper, we critically respond to the vision of biochemical enhanced happiness (bio-happiness). We follow the classic and modern authors in our analysis of what happiness is, and based on this analysis, we want to demonstrate why the biochemical enhancement of happiness is not a moral imperative these days. On the contrary, we offer the reasoning why such a vision of bio-happiness is not morally right, and why it bears the risk of losing the connection between happiness and finding the meaningfulness of life. We critically evaluate the absence of spirituality in the transhumanist understanding of man and the devaluation of her/his intrinsic values.