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\"The 2000 presidential election, with its problems in Florida, was not the first major vote-counting controversy in the nation's history--nor the last. Ballot Battles traces the evolution of America's experience with these disputes, from 1776 to now, explaining why they have proved persistently troublesome and offering an institutional solution\"-- Provided by publisher.

In the midst of this pandemic, most Christian Churches in the United States have been required to limit severely if not suspend face-to-face worship. The responses to this challenge when it comes to celebrating the Eucharist have been multiple. Frequent pastoral responses have included the shipping of consecrated elements to folk for their use during live-stream worship and virtual communion, in which worshippers employ elements from their own households as communion elements during the digitized worship. These options are not permitted for Roman Catholics. Instead, it is most common for Roman Catholics to be invited into spiritual communion. This is often considered a diminished, even ternary form of communing, quickly dispensed when quarantines are lifted and herd immunity achieved. On the other hand, there is a rich and thoughtful tradition about spiritual communion that recognizes it as an essential element in communion even when such is experienced face-to-face. This article intends to affirm the values of spiritual communion as a real, mystical and fruitful action that not only sustains people worshipping from afar, but enhances an authentic eucharistic spirituality.

Serving as an introduction to this special issue of Religion entitled “Music and Spirituality: A Journey into Porosity,” this introduction frames the following eight essays by considering the ambiguity not only of the meaning of music itself, but also of spirituality, liturgical-sacred music and other frames that attempt to examine and sometimes delimit the power of music. While taxonomies and theoretical boundaries are still useful, they need to be employed with some caution in view of the musical and spiritual realities they are attempting to describe or analyze.

Over the centuries, the dynamic and fluid charism labeled “Franciscanism” has evolved, changed and morphed well beyond the vision of St. Francis and St. Clare. There is ample evidence to suggest that, after Vatican II and its mandate for religious communities to renew themselves (Perfectae caritatis, nn. 2 et passim), Franciscans of various stripes have done just that. On the other hand, the majority of First Order friars in the world are yet clerics, often minister in diocesan settings (e.g., parishes), and frequently self-identify more as “Fr”. than “Br”. Recent developments in postcolonial and decolonial theory provide valuable lenses for discerning to what extent First Order Franciscans have actually recovered the founding charisms. While distinguished by genealogy, chronology and priorities—some argue that decolonization is about reasserting control of land and resources, while decolonialization is concerned with the epistemic control that continues long after foreign administrations have receded—these two frames are yet intimately linked. Together, they provide welcomed tools for discerning to what extent monasticized, clericalized and “diocesanized” stands of ministry, administration and thinking persist among First Order friars in the 21st century. This engagement with unexpected dialogue partners from critical theories, rather than with the more comfortable and traditional arenas of history and spirituality, promises fresh and maybe even unsettling insights about our enacted spirituality.

This essay considers how an expanded understanding of sacramentality is enhanced by engagement with chaos theory and decolonial theory. These unique lenses enlarge traditional Roman Catholic frameworks for considering God’s self-communication through sacramental action as well as the agency of ordinary believers and even non-believers in the sacramental enterprise.

American democracy is plagued by excessive partisanship, and yet constitutional law thus far has been incapable of redressing this ill. Gerrymandering is one clear example: the partisan distortion of legislative districts has accelerated dramatically in the last several decades, yet the federal judiciary has been unable to develop a constitutional standard for curbing this egregiously antidemocratic behavior. Likewise, state legislatures around the country in the last decade have been enacting statutes to cut back on voting opportunities, and federal courts have struggled with articulating appropriate standards for evaluating the constitutionality of these rollback laws. A main reason for this struggle has been the judicial unwillingness to tackle directly the transparently partisan motives underlying these legislative cut backs in voting opportunities. This judicial difficulty with curtailing excessive partisanship stems from an attempt to rely on equal protection as the relevant constitutional standard for judicial review of election laws. Invocation of equal protection is understandable given the initial success of Warren Court precedents, like Reynolds v Sims and Harper v Virginia Board of Elections, in using equal protection to protect equal voting rights. But as the courts have subsequently discovered, equal protection is ill-suited to the problems of gerrymandering or legislation that cuts back on voting opportunities for all voters. This Article offers a previously undeveloped alternative to equal protection: due process. In a wide range of areas, including civil and criminal procedure, the Supreme Court has long recognized that due process encompasses a principle of fair play. This fair play principle, well understood to apply in society to athletic competition, is suitable in the domain of politics for constraining excessive partisanship in electoral competition. In fact, the history of the Fourteenth Amendment's ratification reveals that this fair play principle played an essential role in constraining excessive partisanship that threatened to destabilize the Republic at the time the amendment's ratification was under consideration in Congress. Once the significance of this history is recognized, the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause is properly construed as constraining the partisan overreaching that currently threatens to undermine American democracy. In this way, the federal judiciary appropriately can invoke due process to directly redress excessive partisanship in the form of gerrymandering or rollbacks in voting opportunities.

Perhaps the truest test of a nation's ability govern itself democratically is its ability to count ballots fairly and accurately in competitive, high-stakes elections. Yet from the founding on, America's adherence to this ideal has been distinctly uneven. Edward Foley's Ballot Battles is a sweeping synthesis of the subject, tracing how election controversies evolved over time, from the 1780s to the present.

OBJECTIVE:--Understanding how individuals weigh the quality of life associated with complications and treatments is important in assessing the economic value of diabetes care and may provide insight into treatment adherence. We quantify patients' utilities (a measure of preference) for the full array of diabetes-related complications and treatments. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS--We conducted interviews with a multiethnic sample of 701 adult patients living with diabetes who were attending Chicago area clinics. We elicited utilities (ratings on a 0-1 scale, where 0 represents death and 1 represents perfect health) for hypothetical health states by using time-tradeoff questions. We evaluated 9 complication states (e.g., diabetic retinopathy and blindness) and 10 treatment states (e.g., intensive glucose control vs. conventional glucose control and comprehensive diabetes care [i.e., intensive control of multiple risk factors]). RESULTS:--End-stage complications had lower mean utilities than intermediate complications (e.g., blindness 0.38 [SD 0.35] vs. retinopathy 0.53 [0.36], P < 0.01), and end-stage complications had the lowest ratings among all health states. Intensive treatments had lower mean utilities than conventional treatments (e.g., intensive glucose control 0.67 [0.34] vs. conventional glucose control 0.76 [0.31], P < 0.01), and the lowest rated treatment state was comprehensive diabetes care (0.64 [0.34]). Patients rated comprehensive treatment states similarly to intermediate complication states. CONCLUSIONS:--End-stage complications have the greatest perceived burden on quality of life; however, comprehensive diabetes treatments also have significant negative quality-of-life effects. Acknowledging these effects of diabetes care will be important for future economic evaluations of novel drug combination therapies and innovations in drug delivery.