Threshold Dwellers In The Age Of Global Pandemic

So many lives have been lost now and the death toll still continues to rise because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The poor and the marginalized, not surprisingly, have been disproportionately affected. The pandemic has exposed the fault lines not only in our healthcare but also in our political and economic system, a system driven by the pursuit of the bottom line—profits. If we are not only to survive but also thrive as a global society, the challenge of the coronavirus pandemic must lead us to explore ways of thinking, being, and dwelling that promote our shared flourishing. It is time to take personal stock about ourselves: who we are, where we have been, and where we are heading. What can the pandemic teach us about ourselves? What is it revealing about us and our situation? How shall we dwell together? Do we want to wake up to a new and better tomorrow after this nighttime of pandemic? That will largely depend on the way we respond now. Who are we becoming in this time of pandemic? What daily practices are we doing as embodiments of the new world we are anticipating?

For decades, scholars of African, African American, Asian, Asian American, Latino/a/x, and Native American heritage have employed their intellect, histories, and lived experience as a means to produce new and courageous scholarship and imagine greater in the Society of Biblical Literature. This volume celebrates the thirty years of service of SBL’s Committee on Underrepresented Racial and Ethnic Minorities in the Profession (CUREMP), a vital body in SBL dedicated to advancing the representation and work of racial and ethnic minoritized scholars in biblical studies. The volume includes the presidential addresses of groundbreaking scholars Brian K. Blount, Fernando F. Segovia, Vincent L. Wimbush, and Gale A. Yee. Gay L. Byron, Ahida Calderón Pilarski, Leslie D. Callahan, Jin Young Choi, Gregory L. Cuéllar, Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Velma E. Love, Andrew Mbuvi, Raj Nadella, Janette H. Ok, Angela N. Parker, Abraham Smith, Yak-hwee Tan, and Ekaputra Tupamahu provide reflections and responses that honor those who have led the way and point in new directions for future generations of scholars.

"Threshold 2000" helps us face up to a profound choice at the millenial crossing--to continue on the path of present beliefs and policies to an increasingly crowded, polluted, and vulnerable world, or to take the path of hope to a more sustainable, healthy, and secure global community. The unique feature of this book is its impassioned integration of ecological analysis with the search for spiritually informed values. "Threshold 2000" offers both a challenge and a vision to people of all faiths and no faith.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

With a New Chapter and Updated Epilogue on Coronavirus A Financial Times Best Health Book of 2019 and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice "Honigsbaum does a superb job covering a century’s worth of pandemics and the fears they invariably unleash." —Howard Markel, MD, PhD, director of the Center for the History of Medicine, University of Michigan How can we understand the COVID-19 pandemic? Ever since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, scientists have dreamed of preventing such catastrophic outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet despite a century of medical progress, viral and bacterial disasters continue to take us by surprise, inciting panic and dominating news cycles. In The Pandemic Century, a lively account of scares both infamous and less known, medical historian Mark Honigsbaum combines reportage with the history of science and medical sociology to artfully reconstruct epidemiological mysteries and the ecology of infectious diseases. We meet dedicated disease detectives, obstructive or incompetent public health officials, and brilliant scientists often blinded by their own knowledge of bacteria and viruses—and see how fear of disease often exacerbates racial, religious, and ethnic tensions. Now updated with a new chapter and epilogue.

"The widely held assumption that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is a temporary situation and that the 'peace process' will soon bring an end to Israeli abuses has obscured the reality on the ground today of Israel's entrenched discriminatory rule over Palestinians. A single authority, the Israeli government, rules primarily over the area between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, populated by two groups of roughly equal size, methodologically privileging Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians, most severely in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), made-up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Drawing on years of human rights documentation, case studies and a review of government planning documents, statements by officials and other sources, [this report] examines Israel's treatment of Palestinians and evaluates whether particular Israeli policies and practices in certain areas amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution."--Page 4 of cover.

This volume describes the methods used in the surveillance of drinking water quality in the light of the special problems of small-community supplies, particularly in developing countries, and outlines the strategies necessary to ensure that surveillance is effective.

In addition to the infectious context, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought many complications to social life. Fear, anxiety, misinformation, and loneliness associated with isolation, as well as uncertainty about the days ahead, have already caused psychological and emotional changes in many people. Many social groups, such as cancer patients, the elderly, schoolchildren, and people with disabilities, were particularly vulnerable to the psychosocial effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. In light of current data, even the WHO suggests that the psychological context of the pandemic may have caused more psychological damage than World War II. Some researchers also infer the existence already of a post-pandemic stress syndrome, which is currently not an official medical diagnosis, but rather a subtype of PTSD that is being diagnosed. Also noted in the context of the pandemic is the breakdown of many social ties due to isolation, loneliness, the development of symptoms of depressive or anxiety disorders, and the transformation of social life. Thus, it seems reasonable to estimate the magnitude of phenomena of psychosocial importance, resulting from the impact of the epidemiological situation associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The primary issue to be considered within the framework of the topic is the identification of psychosocial factors affecting the quality of mental and social health of various social groups, which are determined by the epidemiological situation associated with COVID-19. In this view, the determining variables will be personal feelings of stress, fear, anxiety, depression, discouragement, alienation, and loneliness, and in a global sense the reference of these phenomena to the comfort and quality of social life, with particular emphasis on interpersonal relationships. COVID-19, as mentioned above, continues to be an important social issue, and, although the situation related to it has recently softened and media reports becoming less frequent. It is inferred that we will only now see the full impact of the problems associated with the mental health crisis and the breakdown of interpersonal relationships caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.