[Dr. Sanjeev] Arora started wondering whether some of the care he delivered, largely diagnosing Hepatitis C and monitoring subsequent treatment, could be delivered by primary care doctors elsewhere in the state. It would save patients the long trips across the state, not to mention free up Aurora’s own schedule.

Arora reached out to primary care doctors across the state and found 21 that were interested in additional training on how to treat Hepatitis C themselves. They began holding weekly video-conferences, where the primary care doctors peppered Arora with questions about diagnoses and a subsequent treatment plan. Then, they went back to their clinics and delivered the care themselves.

A subsequent study would show that care to be just as good as what was delivered in an academic medical center ”” minus the 400-mile round trip.

Read it all.

The United States women’s soccer team is not a Dream Team. It can’t be. After all, Dream Teams don’t have nightmares, as Abby Wambach grimly described last summer’s shootout loss to Japan in the World Cup final.

It is strange then how many and how widely the Americans continually captivate. Typically, fans in the United States fall in love with the fresh, new face ”” think of the gymnast Gabby Douglas and the swimmer Missy Franklin ”” or become obsessed with a team based on dominance and power and might. The Olympic men’s basketball teams are made up of N.B.A. mercenaries, yes, but they are almost always effective mercenaries. They throttle. They pummel. They thump.

The women’s soccer team does not, or at least it has not as often over the past few years….The attraction, it seems, lies in their flaws. Unlike the basketball Dream Teams and unlike their sporting ancestors, the commanding women’s soccer squads of the 1990s, the current incarnation is gloriously imperfect.

Read it all.

Over at Capital Economics they’re spotlighting Aug. 9, 2007 as the “the unofficial onset of the global credit crunch” making tomorrow the fifth anniversary of, well, the beginning of the end of the uber-loose financial conditions that begat the U.S. housing boom, bust, financial crisis, bailout-a-palooza, deep recession and ”” if you believe Reinhart and Rogoff ”” the economic sluggishness we’re still contending with.

Of course, it’s a little bit squishy declaring any one moment the “start” of something. Some would argue that the birth of the securitization market way back in the 1980s might have been the true start of what eventually became the U.S. housing morass. Still, it’s instructive to remember what was going on in early August 2007, which was when the cracks in the foundation of global finance really started to get noticeable and the themes that have come to define the market for the last half-decade started to emerge.

Read it all.

The greatest economic catastrophe of the postwar world began five years ago today. Its consequences are still with us.

On this day in 2007 BNP Paribas, the French bank, halted withdrawals from three investment funds linked to the US subprime mortgage market. Risky financial products had spread a contagion of bad debts through the banking system. The interbank lending market froze because banks feared that they would not get their money back. The consequences included the first run on a British bank in more than a century (Northern Rock), the biggest corporate failure in American history (Lehman Brothers), and a huge recession.

With hindsight, this was not merely a crisis but a catastrophe that still overshadows the global economy. The crash was a far-reaching problem of solvency. It was not simply a banking crisis, but a debt crisis. It has not simply sunk financial institutions, but submerged governments too. Five years on, there are three questions. How did it happen? When will it end? What, if anything, can we do about it?

Read it all (requires subscription).

For me, this is hard but important reading–you can find the link with pictures here.

Dave Hazewinkel, Sam’s father, wrestled in the 1968 and 1972 Olympics. With Sam wrestling in London this week as part of the U.S. team, the pair becomes the first U.S. father and son wrestlers to compete in the Olympics for the United States.

“It’s hard to put in words,” Sam said about competing in the Olympics. “It’s been a dream of mine that I’ve been chasing since I was really young. It’s not everywhere that you get the kind of support that I got from my dad, where I understood that I could be an Olympian. He did it. I could do it. Hard work pays off.”

Dave and Sam share more than a father-son relationship, however. They’re also brothers in Christ, ever since Dave led Sam to the Lord when he was 6 years old.

Read it all.

…the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World has said it is “in conflict” with the president’s stance but applauds Obama for “his many achievements in improving the quality of life for all Americans.”

Overall, African-Americans remain one of the groups most opposed to gay marriage: 51 percent are opposed, while 40 percent support it, according to a recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. That support, however, has edged up from 26 percent just four years ago. Among black Protestants, opposition is slightly higher, at 54 percent.

Pew researchers said Obama’s support hasn’t noticeably shifted opinion in either direction, but some smaller groups are seeking to galvanize lingering black skepticism over gay marriage to make it a wedge issue for African-American voters this November.

Read it all.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

The transition from Victorian to more modern forms of universalism is marked by some changes of which the most important concerns exegesis. Almost all universalists before this century thought it necessary to argue for a universalist interpretation of those texts of the NT which seem to teach eternal punishment or final condemnation, and the standard approach to such texts was to deny the everlasting or final character of the punishment. Texts such as Matthew 25:46 or even Revelation 14:10f. were held to refer to a very long but limited period of torment in hell, from which the sinner will eventually emerge to salvation. The nineteenth-century debates always included extensive exegetical discussions, especially over the meaning of aionios. In [the 20th] century, however, exegesis has turned decisively against the universalist case. Few would now doubt that many NT texts clearly teach a final division of mankind into saved and lost, and the most that universalists now commonly claim is that alongside these texts there are others which hold out a universal hope (e.g. Eph. 1: 10; Col. 1: 20).

–Richard Bauckham, Universalism: a historical survey a Themelios article from 1978 (emphasis mine).

The sixth meeting of the Anglican-Jewish Commission of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and office of the Archbishop of Canterbury was hosted by the latter, at Mansfield College Oxford, on 31st July and 1st August 2012 / 12th and 13th ….

The Commission’s mandate is taken from the provisions of the joint declaration of the Archbishop and the Chief Rabbis made at Lambeth Palace on 6th September 2006 and confirmed at their subsequent meeting in Jerusalem.

The meeting opened with the reading of a message from the Archbishop of Canterbury expressing his appreciation of the important ongoing relationship that the Commission represents and his own warm relationship with the Chief Rabbis of Israel with whom he had met earlier in the year in Jerusalem.

Read it all.

You can find the 1998 material there and that from 2008 here.

Make no mistake, there is no shortage of [smaller donors such as] Susan Daoles this year: Roughly 2.5 million people have kicked in $200 or less to the various committees helping their candidate win the White House.
But those 2.5 million people account for less than 18 percent of the total money haul.

By contrast, 2,100 donors giving $50,000 or more have contributed about $200 million to the Obama and Romney campaign committees, victory funds and their supportive super PACs. That’s far more than the $148 million all those 2.5 million small donors contributed through the end of June, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by POLITICO and the Campaign Finance Institute.

In other words: In an election purportedly being driven by the economic concerns of the middle class, the top 0.07 percent of donors are more valuable than the bottom 86 percent.

Read it all.

Fort Mill, South Carolina–The bocce ball court is busy. The swimming pool is crowded. Golf carts whiz down well-manicured trails. Couples walk briskly through sprawling neighborhoods of charming one-story houses.

“I’m very happy that we’re here,” says Dorothy “Dottie” Serran, 69, of the Carolina Lakes Sun City community she and husband Ralph, 70, moved to after retirement. “It’s very nice. ”¦ You can do as much as you want or as little as you want.”

Life is good for most of the nation’s seniors, according to a recent poll of 2,250 older adults. Whether they move to “active adult” communities such as Sun City or grow old in the homes where they raised their children, they say they are pretty darn content.

Read it all.

Quick Stats[:]

As of 2012-06 the civilian labor force was 155,163,000
As of 2012-06 there were 111,145,000 in the private workforce
As of 2012-06 there were 56,174,538 collecting some form of SS or disability benefit
Ratio of SS beneficiaries to private employment just passed the 50% mark (50.54%)

….As of May 2012, the outlays are $756.9 billion annualized. Fewer worker relatively speaking, support more and more recipients with exponentially growing payments. This is supposed to work?

Read it all from Mish’s economics blog (another from the long queue of should-have-already-been-posted material).

Lord Jesus,
You came to us
as the Word made flesh,
making God’s presence
real to all mankind.
Help us through our
fellowship of
study and prayer
to deepen our understanding,
to strengthen our discipleship,
to witness to your truth,
and become
temples of your Spirit.

Amen

Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, “Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a cripple, by what means this man has been healed, be it known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by him this man is standing before you well. This is the stone which was rejected by you builders, but which has become the head of the corner. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”

–Acts 4:8-12

Read it all.

After the match’s final point, [Misty] May-Treanor and [Kerri] Walsh collapsed on the sand and embraced. They hugged their opponents before beginning a victory lap around the court, finding their friends, family and coaches in the stands.

One of the most touching moments of the celebration featured Walsh, wrapped in the American flag, holding both of her sons in her arms as fans cheered.

Read it all.

We’ve become so accustomed to the narrative of “mainline decline” that it is difficult to get our minds around a more nuanced version of this story. How do you tell this story?

The ecumenical leaders achieved much more than they and their successors give them credit for. They led millions of American Protestants in directions demanded by the changing circumstances of the times and by their own theological tradition. These ecumenical leaders took a series of risks, asking their constituency to follow them in antiracist, anti-imperialist, feminist and multicultural directions that were understandably resisted by large segments of the white public, especially in the Protestant-intensive southern states.

It is true that the so-called mainstream lost numbers to churches that stood apart from or even opposed these initiatives, and ecumenical leaders simultaneously failed to persuade many of their own progeny that churches remained essential institutions in the advancement of these values.

But the fact remains that the public life of the United States moved farther in the directions advocated in 1960 by the Christian Century than in the directions then advocated by Christianity Today. It might be hyperbolic to say that ecumenists experienced a cultural victory and an organizational defeat, but there is something to that view. Ecumenists yielded much of the symbolic capital of Christianity to evangelicals, which is a significant loss. But ecumenists won much of the U.S. There are trade-offs.

Read it all.

The day Michael Anselmo signed a lease on his first apartment in New York City, he lost his job at Buck Consultants LLC. He spent about 10 months struggling to pay rent with unemployment benefits. Two years later he’s still hesitant to buy a home or even a road bike.

“Every decision that I have made since I lost my job has been colored by that insecurity I feel about the future,” said Anselmo, 28, who now rents an apartment in Austin, Texas, and works as a consultant for UnitedHealth Group Inc. “Buying a house is just further out on the timeline for me than it used to be.”

Anselmo and many of his peers are wary about making large purchases after entering adulthood in the deepest recession and weakest recovery since World War II. Confronting a jobless rate above 8 percent since 2009 and student-loan debt hitting about $1 trillion, 20-to-34-year-olds are renting apartments, cars and even clothing to save money and stay flexible.

Read it all.