Medicine in the twenty-first century will be very different from the medicine of today; scientific, technological, economic, and ethical conditions of practice will be transformed. What do these changes portend for medical education? What knowledge should all medical students acquire? How can medical educators prepare students in the most cost-effective way?

This book describes efforts made at Harvard Medical School during the past to reorient general medical education. Harvard’s New Pathway has received national attention since its inception—including a multipart special on PBS’s Nova—because it offers a radical restructuring of the traditional medical school curriculum. Its creators, most of them contributors to this book, designed a program that gives students not only a core of scientific, biomedical, and clinical knowledge but also the skills, tools, and attitudes that will enable them to become lifelong learners, to cope with and use new information, and—most important—to provide better patient care.

New Pathways to Medical Education also tells the inside story of how a traditional and research-oriented faculty was persuaded to cooperate with colleagues outside their departments in adopting a student-centered, problem-based approach to learning. Central to this transformation was the Patient–Doctor course, which the book describes in detail. This course—which teaches students to LISC the patient–doctor relationship for the benefit of patients—is considered one of the most significant contributions to medical education in the New Pathway.

New Pathways to Medical Education will inspire physicians, medical scientists, and medical educators around the world to think and act more decisively to reform medical education. And because it documents the development of an innovative curriculum, this study will interest educators in all fields.

In 2004 the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston announced plans to close or merge more than eighty parish churches. Scores of Catholics—28,000, by the archdiocese’s count—would be asked to leave their parishes. The closures came just two years after the first major revelations of clergy sexual abuse and its cover up. Wounds from this profound betrayal of trust had not healed.

In the months that followed, distraught parishioners occupied several churches in opposition to the closure decrees. Why did these accidental activists resist the parish closures, and what do their actions and reactions tell us about modern American Catholicism? Drawing on extensive fieldwork and with careful attention to Boston’s Catholic history, Seitz tells the stories of resisting Catholics in their own words, and illuminates how they were drawn to reconsider the past and its meanings. We hear them reflect on their parishes and the sacred objects and memories they hold, on the way their personal histories connect with the history of their neighborhood churches, and on the structures of authority in Catholicism.

Resisters describe how they took their parishes and religious lives into their own hands, and how they struggled with everyday theological questions of respect and memory; with relationships among religion, community, place, and comfort; and with the meaning of the local church. No Closure is a story of local drama and pathos, but also a path of inquiry into broader questions of tradition and change as they shape Catholics’ ability to make sense of their lives in a secular world.

An exploration of how and why American city governments delegated the responsibility for solving urban inequality to the nonprofit sector.
 
Nonprofits serving a range of municipal and cultural needs are now so ubiquitous in US cities, it can be difficult to envision a time when they were more limited in number, size, and influence. Turning back the clock, however, uncovers both an illuminating story of how the nonprofit sector became such a dominant force in American society, as well as a troubling one of why this growth occurred alongside persistent poverty and widening inequality. Claire Dunning’s book connects these two stories in histories of race, democracy, and capitalism, revealing how the federal government funded and deputized nonprofits to help individuals in need, and in so doing avoided addressing the structural inequities that necessitated such action in the first place.

Nonprofit Neighborhoods begins after World War II, when suburbanization, segregation, and deindustrialization inaugurated an era of urban policymaking that applied private solutions to public problems. Dunning introduces readers to the activists, corporate executives, and politicians who advocated addressing poverty and racial exclusion through local organizations, while also raising provocative questions about the politics and possibilities of social change. The lessons of Nonprofit Neighborhoods exceed the bounds of Boston, where the story unfolds, providing a timely history of the shift from urban crisis to urban renaissance for anyone concerned about American inequality—past, present, or future.