Much of the developing world, including Kenya, is rapidly urbanizing. Rising food and fuel prices in recent years have put the food security of the urban poor in a precarious position. In cities worldwide, urban agriculture helps some poor people gain access to food, but urban agriculture is less common in densely populated slums that lack space. In the Kibera slums of Nairobi, Kenya, households have recently begun a new form of urban agriculture called sack gardening in which vegetables such (...) as kale and Swiss chard are planted into large sacks filled with topsoil. This paper examines relationships among sack gardening, social capital, and food security in Kibera. We used a mixed methods approach, combining qualitative interviews with a household survey, as well as focus group discussions with both farmers and non-farmers. We present evidence that sack gardening increases social capital, especially for those households that undertake sack gardening in groups. We also find that sack gardening in the Kibera slums has a positive impact on household food security by improving household dietary diversity and by reducing the need to resort to painful coping mechanisms that are used during food shortages. (shrink)

In his talk about G.K.'s Weekly to the 1986 Toronto Conference, Father Brocard Sewell, O. Carm., spoke about Chesterton's tribute to Alderman Cedric Chivers. This tribute was written at the time of Cedric Chivers's death and was published in G.K.'s Weekly . Cedric Chivers was, for many years, the Major of Bath, a bookbinder, and one of the Directors of G.K.'s Weekly. He was one of Chesterton's close friends.

Feminist Care Ethics has much to offer in an analysis of the international migration of care workers. This paper argues, however, that Joan Tronto’s analysis of this international care regime is incomplete insofar as it overlooks the ways in which the current global care market is progressive for the workers and the significant harms this market is inflicting on care receivers in source countries. In order for Feminist Care Ethics to fulfill its potential, it must be developed beyond a visionary (...) tool for revaluing care—it must also produce analytic tools for evaluating real alternatives under pressing, real-time constraints. (shrink)

In the debates surrounding the ethical dimensions of interventions in the human genome, much attention is paid to determining whether—and if so, how—market access to these technologies ought to be managed in order to maximize social benefit. There are those who advocate a “laissez-faire” free-market approach to the development and use of genetic and genomic interventions. We are sympathetic to this view insofar as we understand the workings of the market stimulus effect. We use the term “market stimulus effect” to (...) refer to the outcome of a set of mechanisms whereby early adoption of a new technology by wealthy consumers promotes the development of versions of this product that are cheaper to produce, or are simply .. (shrink)

Some factors which are of great importance in most human affairs seem to play relatively little role in mathematics. We give some examples and suggest reasons why this might be expected to be the case.

2011 Reprint of 1943 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. "St. Thomas Aquinas" is enriched by the author's unique ability to see the world through the saint's eyes, a fresh and animated view that shows us Aquinas as no other biography has. Acclaimed as the best book ever written on Aquinas by such outstanding Thomists as Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and Anton Pegis, this brilliant biography will completely capture the reader and leave him (...) desirous of reading Aquinas' own monumental work. (shrink)

Адресовано курсантам и слушателям образовательных учреждений, учебных центров, центров дополнительной подготовки, курсов повышения квалификации системы МВД Российской Федерации.

Medical decisions regarding end-of-life care have undergone significant changes in recent decades, driven by changes in both medicine and society. Catholic tradition in medical ethics offers clear guidance in many issues, and a moral framework accessible to those who do not share the same faith as well as to members of its faith community. In some areas, a Catholic perspective can be seen clearly and confidently, such as in teachings on the permissibility of suicide and euthanasia. In others, such as (...) withdrawal of nutrition and hydration, the Church does not yet speak with one voice and has not closed out the discussion. Yet, it is not in the teaching on individual issues that a Catholic moral tradition offers the most help and comfort, but in its account of what it means to lead a life in Christ, and to prepare for a Christian death. As in the problem of pain and suffering, it is the spiritual support more than the ethical guidance that helps both patients and physicians bear the unbearable and fathom the unfathomable. (shrink)

International medical travel occurs when patients cross national borders to purchase medical goods and services. On occasion, physicians in home countries will be the last point of domestic contact for patients seeking healthcare information before they travel abroad for care. When this is the case, physicians have a unique opportunity to inform patients about their options and help guide them towards ethical practices. This opportunity brings to the fore an important question: What role should physicians in more-developed home countries play (...) in promoting or constraining international medical travel towards less-developed destination countries? In our view, critical attention to the decision spaces of patients—defined by the personal circumstances, socio-cultural cues, and legal constraints that inform decision-making—is a useful starting point for evaluating the proper response of physicians to various forms of international medical travel. (shrink)

We argue that the ecological research community should develop a plan for improving the ethical consistency and moral robustness of the field. We propose a particular ethics strategy—specifically, an ongoing process of collective ethical reflection that the community of ecological researchers, with the cooperation of applied ethicists and philosophers of biology, can use to address the needs we identify. We suggest a particular set of conceptual and analytic tools that, we argue, collectively have the resources to provide an empirically grounded (...) and conceptually complete foundation for an ethics strategy for ecological research. We illustrate our argument with information gathered from a survey of ecologists conducted at the 2013 meeting of the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution. (shrink)

In ‘Why not NIMBY?’, Simon Feldman and Derek Turner mount a compelling case that NIMBY claims are not intrinsically morally unjustified, despite the fact that NIMBY-claimants...

There is a strong need to connect agricultural research to social movements and community-based food system reform efforts. Participatory research methods are a powerful tool, increasingly used to give voice to communities overlooked by academia or marginalized in the broader food system. Plant breeding, as a field of research and practice, is uniquely well-suited to participatory project designs, since the basic process of observing and selecting plants for desirable traits is accessible to participants without formal plant breeding training. The challenge (...) for plant breeders engaged in participatory research is to consider not only how their work incorporates farmer input in developing new varieties, but also how it interacts with broader questions of food sovereignty, food justice, diversity and democratization in the food system. This article examines these issues in the context of the Seed to Kitchen Collaborative, a participatory variety evaluation and breeding project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (shrink)