Search

This essay, an outgrowth of the Legislative Ethics and the Media Project, builds upon project meetings and interviews with members of a special task force made up of journalists representing various special ties and perspectives within the media as well as legislators, congressional staff members, and academic experts. The first of five sections discusses representation and the press and dilemmas in reporting legislative ethics. Section II, "The Relationship between Journalists and Legislators," presents a historical perspecitve of three distinct periods of press-Congress relations, as well as subsections dealing respectively with criticisms by journalists and legislators of media coverage, conflicting roles, "the plural media," and special pressures on the legislator-journalist relationship. Principles of legislative ethics and the media's role are further examined in section III. Section IV, "The Ethics of Journalists as Unelected Representatives," focuses on the foundations and principles of journalism ethics and two kinds of constraints hampering the ability of journalists to fulfill their duties of autonomy, accountability, and responsibility in covering Congress. The final section, "Journalism and the Ethics of Legislative Life," considers the interconnection and mutual ethical interdependence of legislative and journalistic ethics. (LH)

Outstanding Academic Title for 2007, Choice Magazine Much has been written about medicine and the market in recent years. This book is the first to include an assessment of market influence in both developed and developing countries, and among the very few that have tried to evaluate the actual health and economic impact of market theory and practices in a wide range of national settings. Tracing the path that market practices have taken from Adam Smith in the eighteenth century into twenty-first-century health care, Daniel Callahan and Angela A. Wasunna add a fresh dimension: they compare the different approaches taken in the market debate by health care economists, conservative market advocates, and liberal supporters of single-payer or government-regulated systems. In addition to laying out the market-versus-government struggle around the world—from Canada and the United States to Western Europe, Latin America, and many African and Asian countries—they assess the leading market practices, such as competition, physician incentives, and co-payments, for their economic and health efficacy to determine whether they work as advertised. This timely and necessary book engages new dimensions of a development that has urgent consequences for the delivery of health care worldwide.

The author examines the general ethical issues, development of ethical criteria, and rights of individuals, governments and voluntary organizations in considering excessive population growth and the ethical dilemma it presents. The question is posed: If traditional values assigned to unrestricted procreation with its concomitant increase in population size are to be revised, what ethical guidelines are necessary? The author sets up some formal criteria and preference ranking. When conditions require limitation of freedom, it should be limited in ways which require least amount of coercion, limit coercion to fewest cases, are most problem-specific, allow most room for dissent of conscience, limit coercion to narrowest range of human rights, least threaten human dignity, and are quickly reversible if conditions change. Freedom of choice in family planning has not yet been tried in the world, nor has an all-out educational effort been made to encourage people to change their habits of procreation. Until these are tried, coercive measures are premature.

The tenth and eleventh centuries are pivotal for the history of the West. The writings of Ademar of Chabannes, many of which are still unpublished, offer numerous insights into why these changes were occurring. Because his promotion of the cult of St. Martial of Limoges contains much that is exaggerated or even untrue, his writings have been viewed with suspicion. What this book seeks to do is make clear that such distrust is justified, but that there is much material in those manuscripts throwing light on the origins of the crusades, the rise of heresy, the great feudal warfare and the reality of apocalyptic fear.

A provocative call to rethink America's values in health care.

A provocative call to rethink America's values in health care.

This book tells the story of how a team of colleagues at Boston College took an unusual approach (working with a design consultancy) to renewing their core and in the process energized administrators, faculty, and students to view liberal arts education as an ongoing process of innovation. It aims to provide insight into what they did and why they did it and to provide a candid account of what has worked and what has not worked. Although all institutions are different, they believe their experiences can provide guidance to others who want to change their general education curriculum or who are being asked to teach core or general education courses in new ways. The book also includes short essays by a number of faculty colleagues who have been teaching in BC’s new innovative core courses, providing practical advice about the challenges of trying interdisciplinary teaching, team teaching, project-or problem-based learning, intentional reflection, and other new structures and pedagogies for the first time. It will also address some of the nuts and bolts issues they have encountered when trying to create structures to make curriculum change sustainable over time and to foster ongoing innovation.

A biography of the eighteenth-century Austrian composer responsible for the creation of the modern orchestra and numerous advances in musical techniques.