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Marriage is at the center of one of today's fiercest political debates. Activists argue about how to define it, judges and legislators decide who should benefit from it, and scholars consider how the state should protect those who are denied it. Few, however, ask whether the state should have anything to do with marriage in the first place. In Untying the Knot, Tamara Metz addresses this crucial question, making a powerful argument that marriage, like religion, should be separated from the state. Rather than defining or conferring marriage, or relying on it to achieve legitimate public welfare goals, the state should create a narrow legal status that supports all intimate caregiving unions. Marriage itself should be bestowed by those best suited to give it the necessary ethical authority--religious groups and other kinds of communities. Divorcing the state from marriage is dictated by nothing less than basic commitments to freedom and equality.

With his entry into the life of the Church at the age of thirty-three, Augustine believed that he had come into possession of the truth he had long been seeking. Broadly speaking, this was the truth concerning God and spiritual things. As gratifying as this must have been, however, it did not put an end to his intense intellectual striving. Instead, it initiated a form of inquiry that we know by the motto “Faith seeking understanding.” As the motto suggests, this form of inquiry has as its aim, not so much the discovery of new truth, as the rational apprehension

In his account of the medical profession’s ascent, Paul Starr drew a distinction between the social authority of physicians and the cultural authority of medicine—between doctors’ capacity to direct others’ behavior and the ability of medical institutions and discourses to shape meanings of illness, health, wellness, and treatment. Subsequently, scholars have reflected on the social-structural transformations challenging physicians’ social authority but neglected shifts in cultural authority. Focusing on the United States, we find a proliferation and diversification of cultural authority, reflecting a partial movement from the domain of medicine into new terrains of health. This shift is apparent in the resurgence of alternative healing, the advent of new forms of self-care and self-monitoring, the rise of health social movements, and the spread of health information online. We advance a research agenda to understand how the mechanisms and dynamics of cultural authority shape contests to speak in the name of health.

The development of COVID-19 vaccines has been crucial in fighting the pandemic. However, misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines is spread on social media platforms at a rate that has made the World Health Organization coin the phrase infodemic. False claims about adverse vaccine side effects, such as vaccines being the cause of autism, were already considered a threat to global health before the outbreak of COVID-19. We aimed to synthesize the existing research on misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines spread on social media platforms and its effects. The secondary aim was to gain insight and gather knowledge about whether misinformation about autism and COVID-19 vaccines is being spread on social media platforms. We performed a literature search on September 9, 2021, and searched PubMed, PsycINFO, ERIC, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, and the Cochrane COVID-19 Study Register. We included publications in peer-reviewed journals that fulfilled the following criteria: original empirical studies, studies that assessed social media and misinformation, and studies about COVID-19 vaccines. Thematic analysis was used to identify the patterns (themes) of misinformation. Narrative qualitative synthesis was undertaken with the guidance of the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) 2020 Statement and the Synthesis Without Meta-analysis reporting guideline. The risk of bias was assessed using the Joanna Briggs Institute Critical Appraisal tool. Ratings of the certainty of evidence were based on recommendations from the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation Working Group. The search yielded 757 records, with 45 articles selected for this review. We identified 3 main themes of misinformation: medical misinformation, vaccine development, and conspiracies. Twitter was the most studied social media platform, followed by Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. A vast majority of studies were from industrialized Western countries. We identified 19 studies in which the effect of social media misinformation on vaccine hesitancy was measured or discussed. These studies implied that the misinformation spread on social media had a negative effect on vaccine hesitancy and uptake. Only 1 study contained misinformation about autism as a side effect of COVID-19 vaccines. To prevent these misconceptions from taking hold, health authorities should openly address and discuss these false claims with both cultural and religious awareness in mind. Our review showed that there is a need to examine the effect of social media misinformation on vaccine hesitancy with a more robust experimental design. Furthermore, this review also demonstrated that more studies are needed from the Global South and on social media platforms other than the major platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. PROSPERO International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews CRD42021277524; https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42021277524. RR2-10.31219/osf.io/tyevj.

It is important to measure the public response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Twitter is an important data source for infodemiology studies involving public response monitoring. The objective of this study is to examine COVID-19-related discussions, concerns, and sentiments using tweets posted by Twitter users. We analyzed 4 million Twitter messages related to the COVID-19 pandemic using a list of 20 hashtags (eg, \"coronavirus,\" \"COVID-19,\" \"quarantine\") from March 7 to April 21, 2020. We used a machine learning approach, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), to identify popular unigrams and bigrams, salient topics and themes, and sentiments in the collected tweets. Popular unigrams included \"virus,\" \"lockdown,\" and \"quarantine.\" Popular bigrams included \"COVID-19,\" \"stay home,\" \"corona virus,\" \"social distancing,\" and \"new cases.\" We identified 13 discussion topics and categorized them into 5 different themes: (1) public health measures to slow the spread of COVID-19, (2) social stigma associated with COVID-19, (3) COVID-19 news, cases, and deaths, (4) COVID-19 in the United States, and (5) COVID-19 in the rest of the world. Across all identified topics, the dominant sentiments for the spread of COVID-19 were anticipation that measures can be taken, followed by mixed feelings of trust, anger, and fear related to different topics. The public tweets revealed a significant feeling of fear when people discussed new COVID-19 cases and deaths compared to other topics. This study showed that Twitter data and machine learning approaches can be leveraged for an infodemiology study, enabling research into evolving public discussions and sentiments during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the situation rapidly evolves, several topics are consistently dominant on Twitter, such as confirmed cases and death rates, preventive measures, health authorities and government policies, COVID-19 stigma, and negative psychological reactions (eg, fear). Real-time monitoring and assessment of Twitter discussions and concerns could provide useful data for public health emergency responses and planning. Pandemic-related fear, stigma, and mental health concerns are already evident and may continue to influence public trust when a second wave of COVID-19 occurs or there is a new surge of the current pandemic.

This chapter contains sections titled: Beguines, Beghards, and Free Spirits Anxieties about “Lollards” : Middle English Mystics and Heretics Dangerous Mysticism in Early Modern Spain Conclusions References

Context: The exchange of health information on the Internet has been heralded as an opportunity to improve public health surveillance. In a field that has traditionally relied on an established system of mandatory and voluntary reporting of known infectious diseases by doctors and laboratories to governmental agencies, innovations in social media and so-called user-generated information could lead to faster recognition of cases of infectious disease. More direct access to such data could enable surveillance epidemiologists to detect potential public health threats such as rare, new diseases or early-level warnings for epidemics. But how useful are data from social media and the Internet, and what is the potential to enhance surveillance? The challenges of using these emerging surveillance systems for infectious disease epidemiology, including the specific resources needed, technical requirements, and acceptability to public health practitioners and policymakers, have wide-reaching implications for public health surveillance in the 21st century. Methods: This article divides public health surveillance into indicator-based surveillance and event-based surveillance and provides an overview of each. We did an exhaustive review of published articles indexed in the databases PubMed, Scopus, and Scirus between 1990 and 2011 covering contemporary event-based systems for infectious disease surveillance. Findings: Our literature review uncovered no event-based surveillance systems currently used in national surveillance programs. While much has been done to develop event-based surveillance, the existing systems have limitations. Accordingly, there is a need for further development of automated technologies that monitor health-related information on the Internet, especially to handle large amounts of data and to prevent information overload. The dissemination to health authorities of new information about health events is not always efficient and could be improved. No comprehensive evaluations show whether event-based surveillance systems have been integrated into actual epidemiological work during real-time health events. Conclusions: The acceptability of data from the Internet and social media as a regular part of public health surveillance programs varies and is related to a circular challenge: the willingness to integrate is rooted in a lack of effectiveness studies, yet such effectiveness can be proved only through a structured evaluation of integrated systems. Issues related to changing technical and social paradigms in both individual perceptions of and interactions with personal health data, as well as social media and other data from the Internet, must be further addressed before such information can be integrated into official surveillance systems.

Despite the growing body of literature examining social media in health contexts, including public health communication, promotion, and surveillance, limited insight has been provided into how the utility of social media may vary depending on the particular public health objectives governing an intervention. For example, the extent to which social media platforms contribute to enhancing public health awareness and prevention during epidemic disease transmission is currently unknown. Doubtlessly, coronavirus disease (COVID-19) represents a great challenge at the global level, aggressively affecting large cities and public gatherings and thereby having substantial impacts on many health care systems worldwide as a result of its rapid spread. Each country has its capacity and reacts according to its perception of threat, economy, health care policy, and the health care system structure. Furthermore, we noted a lack of research focusing on the role of social media campaigns in public health awareness and public protection against the COVID-19 pandemic in Jordan as a developing country. The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of social media platforms on public health protection against the COVID-19 pandemic via public health awareness and public health behavioral changes as mediating factors in Jordan. A quantitative approach and several social media platforms were used to collect data via web questionnaires in Jordan, and a total of 2555 social media users were sampled. This study used structural equation modeling to analyze and verify the study variables. The main findings revealed that the use of social media platforms had a significant positive influence on public health protection against COVID-19 as a pandemic. Public health awareness and public health behavioral changes significantly acted as partial mediators in this relationship. Therefore, a better understanding of the effects of the use of social media interventions on public health protection against COVID-19 while taking public health awareness and behavioral changes into account as mediators should be helpful when developing any health promotion strategy plan. Our findings suggest that the use of social media platforms can positively influence awareness of public health behavioral changes and public protection against COVID-19. Public health authorities may use social media platforms as an effective tool to increase public health awareness through dissemination of brief messages to targeted populations. However, more research is needed to validate how social media channels can be used to improve health knowledge and adoption of healthy behaviors in a cross-cultural context.

Background Problem gambling is a public health issue affecting both the gamblers, their families, their employers, and society as a whole. Recent law changes in Sweden oblige local and regional health authorities to invest more in prevention and treatment of problem gambling. The economic consequences of gambling, and thereby the potential economic consequences of policy changes in the area, are unknown, as the cost of problem gambling to society has remained largely unexplored in Sweden and similar settings. Methods A prevalence-based cost-of-illness study for Sweden for the year 2018 was conducted. A societal approach was chosen in order to include direct costs (such as health care and legal costs), indirect costs (such as lost productivity due to unemployment), and intangible costs (such as reduced quality of life due to emotional distress). Costs were estimated by combining epidemiological and unit cost data. Results The societal costs of problem gambling amounted to 1.42 billion euros in 2018, corresponding to 0.30% of the gross domestic product. Direct costs accounted only for 13% of the total costs. Indirect costs accounted for more than half (59%) of the total costs, while intangible costs accounted for 28%. The societal costs were more than twice as high as the tax revenue from gambling in 2018. Direct and indirect costs of problem gambling combined amounted to one third of the equivalent costs of smoking and one sixth of the costs of alcohol consumption in Sweden. Conclusions Problem gambling is increasingly recognized as a public health issue. The societal costs of it are not negligible, also in relation to major public health issues of an addictive nature such as smoking and alcohol consumption. Direct costs for prevention and treatment are very low. A stronger focus on prevention and treatment might help to reduce many of the very high indirect and intangible costs in the future.