The COVID-19 pandemic has strained healthcare resources the world over, requiring healthcare providers to make resource allocation decisions under extraordinary pressures. A year later, our understanding of COVID-19 has advanced, but our process for making ethical decisions surrounding resource allocation has not. During the first wave of the pandemic, our institution uniformly ramped-down clinical activity to accommodate the anticipated demands of COVID-19, resulting in resource waste and inefficiency. In preparation for the second wave, we sought to make such ramp down (...) decisions more prudently and ethically. We report the development of a tool that can be used to make fair and ethical decisions in times of resource scarcity. We formed an interprofessional team to develop and use this tool to ensure that a diverse range of stakeholder perspectives were represented in this development process. This team, called the clinical activity recovery team, established institutional objectives that were combined with well-established procedural values, substantive ethical principles and decision-making criteria by using a variation on the well-known accountability for reasonableness ethical framework. The result of this is a stepwise, semiquantitative, ethical decision tool that can be applied to resource allocation challenges in order to reach fair and ethically defensible decisions. This ethical decision tool can be applied in various contexts and may prove useful at both the institutional and the departmental level; indeed this is how it is applied at our centre. As the second wave of COVID-19 strains healthcare resources, this tool can help clinical leaders to make fair decisions. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

This book explores four interrelated themes: rethinking civic education in light of the diversity of U.S. society; re-examining these notions in an increasingly interconnected global context; re-considering the ways that civic education is researched and practiced; and taking stock of where we are currently through use of an historical understanding of civic education. There is a gap between theory and practice in social studies education: while social studies researchers call for teachers to nurture skills of analysis, decision-making, and participatory citizenship, (...) students in social studies classrooms are often found participating in passive tasks rather than engaging critically with the curriculum. _Civic Education for Diverse Citizens in Global Times_, directed at students, researchers and practitioners of social studies education, seeks to engage this divide by offering a collection of work that puts practice at the center of research and theory. (shrink)

In an urbane and persuasive tract for our time, the distinguished Catholic theologian combines a comprehensive metaphysics with a sensitivity to contemporary existentialist thought. Father Murray traces the “problem of God” from its origins in the Old Testament, through its development in the Christian Fathers and the definitive statement by Aquinas, to its denial by modern materialism.Students and nonspecialist intellectuals may both benefit by the book, which illuminates the problem of development of doctrine that is now, even more than in (...) the days of Newman, a fundamental issue between Roman Catholic and Protestant, theologians and nonspecialst intellectuals alike will find the subject of vital interest. As a challenge to the ecumenical dialogue, the question is raised whether, in the course of its development through different phases, the problem of God has come back to its original position. Father Murray is Ordinary professor of theology at Woodstock College, Woodstock, Maryland. St. Thomas More Lectures, 1."A gem of a book—lucid, illuminating, brilliantly written. A fine contribution to the current Catholic theological renaissance."—Paul Weiss. (shrink)