Challuabamba (chī-wa-bamba)—now a developing suburb of Cuenca, the principal city in the southern highlands of Ecuador—has been known for a century as an ancient site that produced exceptionally fine pottery in great quantities. Suspecting that Challuabamban ceramics might provide a link between earlier, preceramic culture and later, highly developed Formative period art, Terence Grieder led an archaeological investigation of the site between 1995 and 2001. In this book, he and the team of art historians and archaeologists who excavated at Challuabamba present their findings, which establish the community's importance as a center in a network of trade and artistic influence that extended to the Amazon River basin and the Pacific Coast.

Art and Archaeology of Challuabamba, Ecuador presents an extensive analysis of ceramics dating to 2100-1100 BC, along with descriptions of stamps and seals, stone and shell artifacts, burials and their offerings, human remains, and zooarchaeology. Grieder and his coauthors demonstrate that the pottery of Challuabamba fills a gap between early and late Formative styles and also has a definite connection with later highland styles in Peru. They draw on all the material remains to reconstruct the first clear picture of Challuabamba's prehistory, including agriculture and health, interregional contacts and exchange, red-banded incised ware and ceramic production, and shamanism and cosmology.

Because southern Ecuador has received relatively little archaeological study, Art and Archaeology of Challuabamba, Ecuador offers important baseline data for what promises to be a key sector of the prehistoric Andean region.

Given the challenges of the environmental crisis, Buddhism's teaching of the interrelatedness of all life forms may be critical to the recovery of human reciprocity with nature. In this new work, twenty religionists and environmentalists examine Buddhism's understanding of the intricate web of life. In noting the cultural diversity of Buddhism, they highlight aspects of the tradition which may help formulate an effective environmental ethics, citing examples from both Asia and the United States of socially engaged Buddhist projects to protect the environment. The authors explore theoretical and methodological issues and analyze the prospects and problems of using Buddhism as an environmental resource in both theory and practice. This groundbreaking volume inaugurates a larger series examining the religions of the world and their ecological implications which will shape a new field of study involving religious issues, contemporary environmental ethics, and public policy concerns.

The Civil War is a pervasive presence in the journals in this volume. “The war searches character,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. Both his reading and his writing reflected his concern for the endurance of the nation, whose strength lay in the moral strength of the people. He read military biographies and memoirs, while turning again to Persian, Chinese, and Indian literature. The deaths of Clough, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and his aunt Mary Moody Emerson prompted him to reread their letters and journals, remembering and reappraising.

These were stirring, poignant years for Emerson. The times were hard, his lecturing was curtailed, and a new book seemed out of the question. He felt the losses, fears, and frustrations that come to those who believe in a cause they are too old to fight for. But his respected position as a man of letters brought him some unusual experiences, such as a trip to Washington in which he met President Lincoln, Secretaries Seward and Chase, and other key figures in the government. Inspecting West Point as a member of the Board of Visitors, he was deeply impressed by the character and spartan training of the cadets who were soon to see action.

At the war’s end, busy again with a heavy lecture schedule and feeling his age a little, he took a long look back at the conflict and concluded that war “heals a deeper wound than any it makes.”

Big data, genomics, and quantitative approaches to network-based analysis are combining to advance the frontiers of medicine as never before. Network Medicine introduces this rapidly evolving field of medical research, which promises to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. With contributions from leading experts that highlight the necessity of a team-based approach in network medicine, this definitive volume provides readers with a state-of-the-art synthesis of the progress being made and the challenges that remain.

Medical researchers have long sought to identify single molecular defects that cause diseases, with the goal of developing silver-bullet therapies to treat them. But this paradigm overlooks the inherent complexity of human diseases and has often led to treatments that are inadequate or fraught with adverse side effects. Rather than trying to force disease pathogenesis into a reductionist model, network medicine embraces the complexity of multiple influences on disease and relies on many different types of networks: from the cellular-molecular level of protein-protein interactions to correlational studies of gene expression in biological samples. The authors offer a systematic approach to understanding complex diseases while explaining network medicine’s unique features, including the application of modern genomics technologies, biostatistics and bioinformatics, and dynamic systems analysis of complex molecular networks in an integrative context.

By developing techniques and technologies that comprehensively assess genetic variation, cellular metabolism, and protein function, network medicine is opening up new vistas for uncovering causes and identifying cures of disease.

Wealth – a household’s assets minus its debts – is an important indicator of child well-being. Higher household wealth related to better academic achievement, behavior, and health among children. Yet a sizeable share of American children, including a majority of Black and Hispanic children, grow up in households with very low levels of wealth, and wealth inequality among households with children is rising even faster than among the general population. This volume of RSF, edited by social policy experts Christina Gibson-Davis and Heather Hill, provides the first comprehensive examination of the contours and consequences of wealth inequality for children under the age of 18. An interdisciplinary roster of contributors consider the vast racial and ethnic disparities in wealth and how those disparities affect child well-being. 
 
Contributors Fabian Pfeffer and Nora Waitkus find that child wealth inequality is far worse in the U.S. than in other industrialized countries. Editors Gibson-Davis and Hill show that a relatively small group of American parents—mostly White—control the lion’s share of wealth, with Black and Hispanic parents having only pennies on the dollar for every dollar of White parental wealth. Nina Bandelj and Angelina Grigoryeva show how White parents with above median wealth are more likely than other parents to practice “financially intensive parenting,” saving and borrowing in ways that promote child achievement. After controlling for other measures of family resources and socioeconomic status, Portia Miller and colleagues demonstrate that family wealth is uniquely related to both academic and behavioral development throughout childhood and adolescence and that wealth helps buffer the negative effects of low family income. Jordan Conwell and Leafia Zi Ye find equalizing wealth is not sufficient to eliminate race- and ethnic-based gaps in academic achievement: even among families with the same levels of wealth Black and Hispanic children often have significantly worse scores than Whites.   
 
High levels of childhood wealth inequality are not inevitable; they are the consequence of laws and practices that favor wealth accumulation among few, primarily White, families. Jin Huang and coauthors look at one of the few policy models for increasing savings in low-income child households, Child Development Accounts, which have been shown to increase educational savings and improve maternal mental health, but they have yet to be adopted nationwide. Two studies in this issue, by Margot Jackson and colleagues and by Katherine Michelmore and Leonard Lopoo, find that large-scale income-support programs, the EITC and Medicaid, have positive spillovers onto asset accumulation, but policies designed to fundamentally alter the distribution of wealth among families with children will require more expansive changes to the tax code and program asset caps.
 
This issue of RSF expands our understanding of wealth inequality and its effects on children, and provides important insights into policies and practices that either directly or indirectly boost wealth acquisition among child households.
 

 

Powerful personal accounts from migrants crossing the US–Mexico border provide an understanding of their experiences, as well as the consequences of public policy

Migrants, refugees, and deportees live through harrowing situations, yet their personal stories are often ignored. While politicians and commentators mischaracterize and demonize, herald border crises, and speculate about who people are and how they live, the actual memories of migrants are rarely shared. In the tradition of oral storytelling, Voices of the Border reproduces the stories migrants have told, offering a window onto both individual and shared experiences of crossing the US–Mexico border.

This collection emerged from interviews conducted by the Kino Border Initiative (KBI), a Jesuit organization that provides humanitarian assistance and advocates for migrants. Based in Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora—twin border cities connected by shared histories, geographies, economies, and cultures—the editors and their colleagues documented migrants’ testimonios to amplify their voices. These personal narratives of lived experiences, presented in the original Spanish with English translations, bring us closer to these individuals’ strength, love, and courage in the face of hardship and injustice. Short introductions written by migrant advocates, humanitarian workers, religious leaders, and scholars provide additional context at the beginning of each chapter.

These powerful stories help readers better understand migrants' experiences, as well as the consequences of public policy for their community.

Royalties from the sale of the book go to the Kino Border Initiative.