Faith-based organizations (FBOs) have a long tradition of providing HIV/AIDS prevention and mitigation services in Africa. The overall response of FBOs, however, has been controversial, particularly in regard to HIV/AIDS prevention and FBO's rejection of condom use and promotion, which can conflict with and negatively influence national HIV/AIDS prevention response efforts. This article reports...

I am Nika Matovac, a medical student and daughter of Ves-na Andrijević-Matovac, who was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was only 11 years old. As you might know, when my mum was writing this column, she was talking about her feelings, her fears, her tears, she told you stories from her life and the life of her friends who were in the same situation… I've written about how I felt during all ...

During a year spent in Seattle as a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy, Rhiannon Tudor Edwards was “overwhelmed” by the choices offered among coffee, TV channels, and health care options, she recounts in her essay, “Blind Faith and Choice” (Health Affairs, Nov./Dec. 2005). But when Edwards, a senior research fellow in health economics at the University of Wales, developed a...

In this reflection about mathematics I shall confine myself to arithmetic, the study of the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, . . . . Everyone has at least the feeling of familiarity with arithmetic, and the issues that concern the human search for truth in mathematics are already present in arithmetic. Here is an illustration of research in arithmetic. About 2500 years ago, the Pythagoreans defined a num...

Than it started – first surgery, then chemotherapy, then radiation, and all over again for several times. Although I was only 11, my mum and my dad explained to me what was going to happen, why my mum needed to remove her breast, why she was going to loose her hair, and why she might be sad from time to time. At first it was OK to deal with it because I was a kid and kids see everything with a ...

Faith is the desire to believe in something as true, or, if not absolutely true, then at least dependable. Faith seems to have been promoted through evolutionary trends, and, as such, it is a concoction of deep brain processes. Related to faith is the concept of truth. Truth is an ephemeral mental construct. We each have some idea of the meaning of truth. Most of the time, our ideas of truth re...

The relationship between ethnic and faith communities in the United States and domestic forces relating to a converging and diverging social contract on the one hand, and US foreign, security and military policies in national, regional and global contexts on the other hand, constitutes the key focus of this paper and the ongoing research upon which it is based. Theories related to American ethn...