Your NBA Offseason Report Card
by Andrew Sharp
We've had three weeks of the NBA offseason, and with one notable exception, the biggest moves have happened already. Things are winding down. Now it's the middle of July, and the only sports currently going are the British Open and baseball. Football is coming soon, but as of this week, it's rough out there. So, what better way to spend the day than thinking way too much about NBA free agency one last time?
Let's grade the NBA offseason.
We begin with the team that kicked off the offseason in earnest back in June. Are you ready to jump on the Pelicans bandwagon? It's time. We thought it was time last year, but then the entire roster got hurt, and the dreams were deferred. Then New Orleans dealt Houston a first-round pick for Omer Asik, taking last year's "win now" approach and doubling down on it.
Now it's time to double down with them. Go all in. Grow a unibrow. Get the angry pelican tattooed on your chest. Paint your house that ugly bronze alternate color they chose for some reason.
I believe in the blueprint. Everyone got hurt last year, which made the Pelicans' offseason look like a flop, but when the core players were healthy, as Kevin Arnovitz pointed out in February, "The Pelicans' desired closing unit — [Jrue] Holiday, [Eric] Gordon, [Tyreke] Evans, [Ryan] Anderson, [Anthony] Davis — dominated the league offensively this season before its members started dropping like flies, scoring an ungodly 123.5 points per 100 possessions."
Losing Anthony Morrow this summer will hurt, Monty Williams is still a question mark as a coach, and it's unclear if they'll ever be able to move Gordon. But while 15 other teams made bigger moves this summer, the Pelicans are quietly sitting there waiting to explode in a few months.
Even the Evans contract that everyone mocked looks 10 times better after he went for 17.4 points and 6.4 assists per game following the All-Star break. Compare Evans's four years for $44 million to what Gordon Hayward and Chandler Parsons are getting, and suddenly $11 million a year is decent.
Oh, and Davis. Trusting the Pelicans' blueprint from the last two summers could look incredibly stupid 12 months from now, but King Brow is the biggest reason I feel confident. He's the next guy to be in the Durant-LeBron conversation, maybe the only real challenger to the throne for the next five years. And in case you forgot, the Sonics/Thunder with Durant won 20 games, 23 games, and then … jumped to 50. Get in on the Pelicans.
GRADE: B-PLUS, PLUS AN ALIEN WITH BASKETBALL SUPERPOWERS
One of the funny parts about spending way too much time on the Internet is that sometimes you initially agree with a criticism, but then everybody starts talking about it and tweeting about it, one-upping each other with hotter takes, and eventually the opinions get taken so far that you can't help but double back and start defending what you were initially criticizing. That's what happened with Daryl Morey this week.
It went like this:
• "Wow, the Rockets really looked like idiots in the end this summer." (Yep.)
• "Morey isn't as invincible as everyone says he is." (100 percent.)
• "What happened this summer was a colossal mistake." (Umm …)
• "Morey's just a product of incestuous media putting him on a pedestal. He's never been that great" (OK.)
• "Seven years in Houston, and Morey's made the second round once. Why doesn't anyone write an article about THAT?" [Backing away slowly]
• "FINALLY, the myth of Morey is being exposed." (Wait, what?)
• "Will the Rockets even make the playoffs this year?" (WHAT?)
Everybody needs to calm down. The Rockets will be OK. This summer was all about going for Chris Bosh and Carmelo Anthony to fill out a contender's nucleus, then going over the cap to bring back Parsons as a fourth star. That plan may not have won a title, but it was worth the risk.
Now Houston's paying Trevor Ariza half of what Parsons is getting, and in return it will still have shooting to stretch the floor, plus much better defense. It's not perfect, but come on. The only way this offseason is that bad is if you think Parsons is that good.
You can debate what the Rockets should do from here, but "not pay Chandler Parsons $15 million a year" is hard to argue with. That decision would've happened next offseason regardless. Just because it came a year early doesn't mean we have to suddenly have a collective reckoning over Morey's supposed fraudulent career.
Anyway, I'm sticking with the Chris Paul comparison from Monday. Morey's easy to root against for all kinds of legitimate reasons, and he's never been as infallible as the hype suggests, but the broader track record is tough to criticize. That part is not a myth. I hated watching the Rockets last year, but go back and look at the 2011 roster. Morey turned that team into James Harden and Dwight Howard and a five-year window in which a title is at least a realistic goal. If the big criticism is "TALK TO ME WHEN HE WINS SOMETHING," well, that's what people say about Paul. It doesn't mean he's not really good.
In conclusion, I hated the Week of Morey Backlash for a lot of reasons, but especially because it made me defend the goddamn Rockets.
GRADE: B, AND A NEW MASCOT
OKC didn't do much this summer, because having Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and Serge Ibaka makes the offseason pretty easy.
The Thunder's biggest move was signing Morrow this week. Morrow's the type of player who becomes twice as valuable on a great team, and his 3-point shooting (45 percent last year) could end up being huge in the playoffs. OKC was pursuing Pau Gasol for a little while but lost him to Chicago, which actually feels like a win. Gasol never made that much sense in Oklahoma City. Were they going to muzzle Westbrook to have him feed Gasol in the post? Run pick-and-rolls with him late in games and bank on Gasol knocking down 18-footers? Ibaka does most of what Gasol can, and he's 10 times better on D. Wouldn't it be better to just roll with Westbrook, Durant, Ibaka, Steven Adams, and a shooter?
Well, yeah. And instead of Gasol, the Thunder got their shooter.
GRADE: A, PLUS A BRAND-NEW PAIR OF WESTBROOK FRAMES
You know who didn't send the entire basketball world into a frenzy this summer?
You know who never opts out when the going gets tough?
His boys wear black, but their collars are blue.
And they're not waving the white flag just yet.
Gregg Popovich has agreed to a contract extension, Spurs say in release. I had been told he was eager to coach another 4-5 years.
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@WojYahooNBA) July 9, 2014
Keep on twerking, kids.
When you're ready to win titles, we can talk about Pop Culture.
GRADE: A FOR TRUE MEANING OF TEAM, A-PLUS FOR THE LAST REAL AMERICAN LEADER
Everything Dallas did seems like it makes more sense on paper than it does in real life. Taking a chance on Tyson Chandler? Sure, seems smart enough. Re-signing Dirk Nowitzki for $8 million a year? Paying $15 million a season to Parsons, stealing a crucial piece from a conference rival? Great job.
But I don't know if it will actually work. Maybe Dallas goes from the eighth seed to the seventh seed? Chandler isn't the same guy he was two years ago. Parsons will hurt the defense, and he probably isn't good enough to make the offense that much better. They lost Vince Carter, Jose Calderon, DeJuan Blair, and probably Shawn Marion. All of those players were important last year, and flipping them for Parsons and Chandler and Raymond Felton doesn't necessarily change things for the better. It's hard to criticize what Dallas did given the options, but it's also hard to get that excited about the Mavericks this year.
The biggest disappointment of the Mavs summer: someone taking down the video of Parsons signing his contract in an Orlando club with Mark Cuban and house music in the background. At least until he goes on The Bachelor, this was the most Chandler Parsons incident in history, especially when he dramatically crushed the plastic cup he was drinking from. Juliet Litman watched it no less than 50 times the day it hit the Internet. Please, someone, put it back on YouTube. For everyone.
GRADE: C, AND A THOUSAND PARSONS FIST PUMPS
They added Carter, brought back Z-Bo for a reasonable price, have Quincy Pondexter and Marc Gasol coming back healthy … Why can't that team win the West next year?
"Pretty good 2009 team," someone said when I asked this yesterday.
I forgot to add that Mike Conley's still the most underrated point guard in the NBA, Nick Calathes won't be suspended for PEDs this spring, and Jordan Adams and Jarnell Stokes should be awesome rookies off the bench.
Bottom line: Carter on the Grizzlies might be even more fun than Mike Miller on the Grizzlies, and they got Z-Bo to sign an extension through 2017 for two years and $20 million, which is even less than Marcin Gortat's making. Everybody else is coming back healthy next year, plus the young guys in the backcourt. The only bummer of the summer is losing Ed Davis, who was a pretty underrated role player off the bench, especially for the 40 or 50 regular-season games when Z-Bo's only going at 80 percent. Still, forget Ed Davis.
Believe in Memphis. Trust in Z-Bo.
GRADE: B-PLUS AND A THOUSAND ELBOWS TO YOUR NECK
They lost Lance, the only guy other than Paul George with the potential to make that offense explosive. Maybe it'll be addition by subtraction, but there's a better chance that this will make an already unwatchable offense just a little more unbearable.
Beyond futile negotiations with Lance (they didn't even get a chance to match the Hornets' offer), the extent of Indy's offseason was signing C.J. Miles, Lavoy Allen, and an auto-generated NBA2K free agent named Shayne Whittington to fill out the bench. They also negotiated a deal to bring over Damjan Rudez, who sounds more like a West Indian mixtape rapper than a Croatian small forward.
We're not quite to the point where everyone can just ignore the Pacers, but it feels close.
GRADE: D, AND LARRY BIRD'S DEAD STARE INTO THE DISTANCE
Pau Gasol isn't the same player he was on offense three years ago, and on defense he'll be almost as big a liability as Carlos Boozer. Is he supposed to solve the scoring issues they had in the playoffs? Paying him $22 million for three years isn't bad, but if he doesn't really fix the offense, and hurts the defense, even an affordable Pau is just money that the Bulls can't spend on real solutions.
Chicago is pinning a lot of hope on Doug McDermott, who should be solid right away, and Nikola Mirotic, who's a total wild card after two years of vague Internet hype and obligatory inclusion in every single Bulls trade rumor. Mirotic sounds great as an idea, but read this scouting report from someone who watched him this year for Real Madrid. (Includes the sentence, "He pretty much made Bostjan Nachbar an NBA All-Star.") They also punted on using two first-round picks in a loaded draft class. Instead of taking, say, Gary Harris and T.J. Warren, they traded up to take McDermott.
It'd be one thing if the Bulls didn't see this coming with free agents this summer, but they had a year to try to create max cap space, and with an offer of four years for $73 million, they came up $23 million short of what the Lakers were offering with the actual max. This basically made it impossible for Carmelo to choose Chicago, which also removed the possibility of a sign-and-trade, because the Knicks knew there's no way Carmelo would ever forfeit $50 million.
So instead Chicago is bringing back Kirk Hinrich, adding Pau, and hoping Joakim Noah stays healthy for a full season again. Everyone's picking them to jump to the top of the East, which could be setting up for a pretty brutal letdown. A lot is riding on Derrick Rose's knee, I guess.
Hopefully, all this is wrong and the Bulls battle to the death with the Cavs in the East, because that makes the whole league more fun. But for a team that makes $60 million per year in profit, and actually has good players, a good coach, a huge market, great fans … Bulls offseasons really shouldn't be this depressing. Somehow they always are.
GRADE: D, AND PRAYERS FOR DERRICK'S KNEE
Carmelo and the Knicks
Not a whole lot more to say about Carmelo than what I wrote about the Bulls while he was still a free agent and what Simmons wrote after he signed with the Knicks. When you consider the bigger picture with his career, his free agency turned out to be a lot more depressing than he ever could have expected.
As for the Knicks … they spent a ton of money to keep Carmelo and stay relevant, and they wanted to do that all along, so I guess that's a win? What's encouraging is that Phil Jackson has been pretty impressive so far. Maybe more than just the Zen Masturbator after all. He started the summer getting rid of Tyson Chandler (who didn't want to be there anymore) and Raymond Felton (who is Raymond Felton). Then he handled the Carmelo free agency perfectly and landed Derek Fisher, who wasn't his first choice but also wasn't Mike Dunleavy. Even if he hasn't had any huge wins yet, Phil hasn't made any huge mistakes, and he's got the Knicks in pretty great shape for the next two offseasons.
So that's good. The new era is under way. But just to be clear, maxing out Melo to lead this team for the next five years pretty much guarantees any new era won't be that new.
GRADE: C, AND SAD HEAD SHAKES
http://i1.wp.com/s3.amazonaws.com/br-cdn/temp_images/2014/01/20/KnicksDBig.gif
A few years ago it seemed like a great time to become a Nets fan. Mikhail Prokhorov had just taken over, and all you ever heard were stories about wild parties with models and awe-inspiring accounts of his limitless wealth. They were also moving to Brooklyn and a state-of-the-art arena, they had Jay Z involved and money to burn … all this while the Knicks continued to sputter to nowhere, spending money in the dumbest, most impatient ways possible, killing their fans a little more every year.
Fast-forward a few years … it is NOT a great time to become a Nets fan. This summer started with the Jason Kidd coaching scandal, which was wonderful both for the feigned outrage over an NBA coach violating some code of loyalty — given how often they're fired, NBA coaches owe absolutely nothing to anyone — and the phrase "Russians are done with Kidd." Then the Russians turned to Lionel Hollins, who would've been great with last year's Nets at least.
Around this time, we learned that the Nets lost $131 million more than any other team in the NBA last year, a number so incredible that even James Dolan was impressed.
Then Brooklyn lost Shaun Livingston to the Warriors, Paul Pierce to the Wizards, and added … Bojan Bogdanovic, the rights to Sergey Karasev (Russian!), and Jarrett Jack, fresh off his nightmare season in Cleveland.
That's the Nets' summer.
They've turned into a more expensive version of the mid-2000s Hawks. They bring back a nucleus of Joe Johnson, a fossilized Kevin Garnett, Brook Lopez, and Deron Williams. I don't even care that he's nailing a 3 in the GIF above. No matter how conflicted Knicks fans feel about Melo's max deal, they can always glance over at Brooklyn's franchise player and feel better. Deron Williams encompasses all the worst stereotypes that people have about Carmelo, but without any of the fun.
Also, after wrecking this roster with Billy King–aided moves to build the most expensive group in the league, there are rumors that Prokhorov might look to sell the team and move on. Go Nets.
GRADE: THIS IS WORSE THAN EAST RUTHERFORD
OK, a couple quick ones:
I still call them the Bobcats in my head, and I have no idea if or when that will change. But yeah, Charlotte. Taking a risk on Lance's upside made more sense for them than just about any team in the league. Throw in Marvin Williams giving you 80 percent of what Gordon Hayward would have at half the price and getting rid of the Bobcats history and horrible uniforms, and Charlotte's had a pretty solid summer. None of this makes up for losing 82 nights of magic with McBob, but at least it softens the blow.
GRADE: B, BUT BRING BACK THE PINSTRIPES
If you don't count Dirk taking a $10 million to $15 million pay cut to help the Mavs sign other stars, the Kyle Lowry contract is probably the best big deal of the summer. Toronto could have panicked and paid him too much after their revival last year, but instead they held firm, and Lowry's staying put and coming back to a roster full of young stars who will all be a year older. Good summer for Raptors truthers.
GRADE: A, BUT BRING BACK THE DINOSAUR JERSEYS
If they don't get Kevin Love, there's still a chance that they keep Klay Thompson and, long-term, turn into a team that can contend with anybody in the league. But there's a much better chance that Love will land in Cleveland, Andre Iguodala and Andrew Bogut will break down over the next few years, Golden State will overpay to keep Klay next summer, and Warriors fans will spend years cursing those few weeks before the draft when this team somehow turned Klay Thompson into a franchise cornerstone. Klay's apparently back in the deal as of Thursday night, so maybe it's not over yet. We'll see.
GRADE: TBD, AND XANAX FOR WARRIORS FANS
Gordon Hayward is good, and as the roster gets better around him he'll only get more valuable. It made sense for Utah to overpay to keep him. Having said that, it's been a lot of fun to watch every single discussion of a contract begin with, "Listen, if Gordon Hayward is making $16 million a year … " That's in a dead heat with, "That deal will look better when the cap goes up in two years," for most dominant cliché of 2014 free agency.
GRADE: B, FOR BELIEVE IN EXUM
The Kings are targeting Josh Smith? What the f–k? Maybe the NBA could do a fantasy draft like in a video game and just disperse all of Sacramento's players across the league. That would make so much more sense than whatever the Kings have been doing the past five years.
GRADE: FREE BOOGIE, FREE STAUSKAS
I wrote about the Summer of Grunfeld earlier this week, and since then the Wiz added Kris Humphries (great depth, solid starter when Nene inevitably gets hurt for 30 games) and DeJuan Blair (human grizzly bear) to help fill out the frontcourt. It's all so incredible.
If you were to pick one GM who won this summer, doesn't it have to be Ernie Grunfeld? Given what was expected, what was possible, and what the Wiz actually accomplished … it's Ernie's world right now.
I'm fully prepared for something horrible to happen to ruin all this come November or December, but the Wizards nailed this offseason. They now join the Raptors and Hornets as the three teams with shockingly realistic chances of competing for the Eastern Conference crown. I'm not including the world's greatest GIF, but just know that it's playing in my heart for the rest of this summer.
GRADE: A+, AND WIZARD PARTY AT ERNIE'S
Chris Bosh probably isn't good enough to be worth $23 million a year on the court, but keeping him at least allows the Heat to preserve some dignity in the short term, and maybe even some hope that they get back to chasing titles in a few years. Overypaying Bosh was smart, and had the added bonus of screwing the Rockets after Houston had been trying to screw them.
Even the Wade deal is decent. Two years and $31 million is fair, and paying him more money the next two years is better than prorating it out until 2018. They'll still re-sign him in two years, but the cap will be higher, and whatever deal Wade gets should be a lot more affordable. Throw in Luol Deng and Josh McRoberts, and Miami still has some decent weapons after all this. This team can maybe crack the top four or five in the East. Now that Shabazz Napier has purged himself and his Twitter account of all LeBron affiliations, Miami's ready to move forward.
None of it makes this summer any less miserable for Miami, of course. Or enjoyable for everyone else. Every time a Heat fan tries to tell you how underrated the offseason has been, just remember all the Heat fans a month ago, telling you how crazy it was that anyone cared about LeBron's free agency. Also, remember Pat Riley's press conference. Also, remember Dwyane Wade's lecture to Kevin Durant. Remember everything.
In the end, this fair for everyone. Not a single person in Miami has any regrets about the way the last four years went down, and not a single person outside Miami has any regrets about the last four weeks.
GRADE: C, AND NOT AN OUNCE OF SYMPATHY
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BsWrrV-CIAMe0qE.jpg
Reading through the Wiggins-for-Love Shootaround yesterday, the most amazing part of all this is that there are no bad outcomes here.
It sounds like Wiggins is on the table with the Wolves, and that's what the Cavs should do. But even if the deal falls through and Wiggins stays … that's just more money to chase free agents with next summer, and maybe they keep Wiggins and add another star next offseason. There's a very real chance they make the NBA Finals anyway, then come back with even more weapons next year. Either that, or the deal gets done and Kevin Love makes the Cavs a title contender for the next five years.
Cleveland can't lose.
Nothing's more surreal than that sentence, and that's exactly how surreal the last few weeks have been. Here we are.
GRADE: A+, WITH DREW CAREY AND JOHNNY AND LEBRON AND LOVE CHISELED ONTO OHIO RUSHMORE
Jeremy Lin.
Jordan-on-the-Wizards Kobe.
Swaggy P.
Jordan Hill making $9 million a year.
Steve Nash hobbling off the bench.
Ryan Kelly.
Robert Sacre.
CARLOS BOOZER.
It's too bad that Julius Randle and Ed Davis have to be involved in this horrible science experiment of a basketball team, but everything else is worth it just to see what happens.
It's all building to a riot outside Jim Buss's house.
It's all building to a first-round pick that they'll try to tank for but inevitably lose to Phoenix when they fall juuuuuuust outside the top five.
It's all building to Kobe losing his mind.
It's all building to Marc Gasol and Rondo next summer and Kevin Durant in 2016. Can't you people see that?
GRADE: A+, LONG LIVE THE OFFSEASON
Filed Under: NBA, Cleveland Cavaliers, Los Angeles Lakers, New Orleans Pelicans, Charlotte Bobcats, Indiana Pacers, Chicago Bulls, Memphis Grizzlies, Zach Randolph, Oklahoma City Thunder, Gregg Popovich, Lance Stephenson, LeBron James, Kevin Love, Andrew Wiggins
Andrew Sharp is a staff editor at Grantland.
Archive @ andrewsharp
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Final Fantasy 7 Update: Part 2 of the Remake Will Be Launched This Month
Posted by Mariah Thomas January 30, 2022
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It appears that Final Fantasy 7 Spinoff Second edition will show up at an upcoming Square Enix celebration. On January 31, 1997, Final Fantasy 7 made its PlayStation breakthrough in Japan.
Square Enix is hosting a distinctive special edition online to mark the 25th anniversary of Final Fantasy 7. Yoshinori Kitase, the legendary Final Fantasy 7 director, and Final Fantasy 7 Prequel creative director Tetsuya Nomura will both appear at the upcoming event.
The stream, which will be broadcast live on YouTube, will begin at 10 a.m. GMT on January 31. Yoshinori Kitase, the legendary Final Fantasy 7 director, and Final Fantasy 7 Spinoff creative director Tetsuya Nomura will both appear at the upcoming event.
There's a slim chance we'll get a launch date, but there's also a chance we'll see some gameplay videos. Remake Part 1 of Final Fantasy 7 premiered in 2020. It was followed in 2021 by an expansion starring the popular character Yuffie.
The remarkable world of the original PlayStation game is expanded and recreated in Final Fantasy 7 Remake. The game is set in Valisthea, an area where gemstone turrets are at the center of a dispute between rival groups. According to the post on the Vevertimes.com website.
The remake of Part 2 of Final Fantasy 7 Is Coming
Final Fantasy 7 Film adaptation was launched 2 years ago, but no sequel has been announced. According to a recent report, the sequel is in the works, and, like its previous versions, in a PlayStation. However, instead of the PS4, the PS5 will be locked out.
What's even more interesting is its possible release date. Final Fantasy 16 is expected to be released this year unless it is postponed. If this occurs, Final Fantasy 7 Remastered version Part 2 might arrive a year later, in 2023.
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Nov 28 An Interview with James Childress
by Dallas Ducar and Louisa Howard
James F. Childress received his B.A. from Guilford College, his B.D. from Yale Divinity School, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. Childress has authored numerous articles and several books in biomedical ethics and in other areas of ethics. His books in biomedical ethics include Principles of Biomedical Ethics (with Tom L. Beauchamp), now in its 7th edition and translated into several languages; Priorities in Biomedical Ethics, Who Should Decide? Paternalism in Health Care, and Practical Reasoning in Bioethics. He is also co-editor of Belmont Revisited: Ethical Principles for Biomedical Research (with Eric Meslin and Harold Shapiro), and Organ Donation: Opportunities for Action (with Catharyn Liverman). Dr. Childress recently retired from the University of Virginia, where he taught for over 40 years. He held the titles of University Professor and John Allen Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics as well as Director of the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life. He was also a Professor of Religious Studies, Professor of Public Policy, and Professor of Research in Medical Education in the School of Medicine.
Dr. Childress has been actively involved in several national committees examining ethics and public policy. He was vice chair of the National Task Force on Organ Transplantation, has served on the Board of Directors of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the UNOS Ethics Committee, the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, the Human Gene Therapy Subcommittee, the Biomedical Ethics Advisory Committee, and several Data and Safety Monitoring Boards for NIH clinical trials. He was a member of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission during the Clinton Administration.
He also chaired the Health Sciences Policy Board of the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Childress is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, formerly named the Institute of Medicine, and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1990 he was named Professor of the Year in the state of Virginia by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education; in 2002 he received the University of Virginia's highest honor—the Thomas Jefferson Award; in 2004 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities; in 2010 he received the Henry Knowles Beecher Award from the Hastings Center.
He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, and a post-doctoral Liberal Arts Fellowship at Harvard Law School. In 2010, he was the Carey and Ann Maguire Chair in American History and Ethics at the Library of Congress. He has been the Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. Professor of Christian Ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University (1975-79) and a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Princeton University, and a Visiting Scholar at the National Institutes of Health. He remains a fellow at the Hastings Center.
His research currently focuses on two major areas: biomedical ethics, with particular attention to theory and method, religion and bioethics, and public bioethics, and just-war theory and pacifism. He taught both undergraduate courses on biomedical ethics, religion and public policy, as well as graduate seminars on love and justice in Christian ethics, just-war theory and pacifism, and legal and ethical reasoning in public policy.
His esteemed undergraduate lecture, Theology, Ethics & Healthcare drew students from all disciplines as it thoroughly examines the myriad ethical issues surrounding modern medicine. Childress' ability to tease through the most nuanced topics without bias, allowing each student to drawn his or her own conclusions, serves as a testament to his edifying and highly-respected approach to teaching. As a professor at the University of Virginia, when not teaching, Dr. Childress was writing, or contributing to his many committee involvements. He could also be found in his office, generously giving his time to advise budding ethicists on curriculum selections, internship opportunities, and beyond. As University of Virginia Alumni, Dallas and Louisa have had the honor of interacting with Dr. Childress both within the classroom and through extracurricular engagements.
On Entering the Field of Biomedical Ethics
D: How did you start your personal journey into bioethics, and how did you become interested in the field?
C: I started teaching at the University of Virginia in 1968, the second year the Department of Religious Studies existed. I was teaching in areas of religion and politics – specifically, courses on civil disobedience, political obligation, just war theory and the like, as well as broader courses. In 1970, during my second year of teaching, the Center for the Study of Science and Technology in Society— which was located in the law school— set up a seminar on artificial and transplantable organs. This was mainly for faculty, but also a few students. They had enough law and medical faculty, but they had no one from the humanities involved. However, it just happened that the chair of that center was a former Yale college classmate of the chair of the Department of Religious Studies. The chair of the center reached out to my departmental chair and said that he needed someone in humanities, preferably someone in ethics, to participate. My departmental chair told me, "I really want you to take part in that." I protested that I was too busy. It was my second year of teaching, and I was teaching three courses a semester, including a large lecture class. However, he persuaded me. It's hard for a junior faculty member to say no to the departmental chair.
That seminar on artificial and transplanted organs was a life-changing event. I wrote a faculty paper for the seminar on "Who Shall Live When Not All Can Live?" which examined different criteria for allocating scarce artificial and transplantable organs, with particular attention to the value of fair equality of opportunity. It was soon accepted for publication in the interdisciplinary journal Soundings (Vol. 53, 1970, pp. 339-355). The editors wanted to include a response to the paper, and the head of the nephrology unit at UVA, who was also a member of the seminar, agreed to respond, reflecting some of the debate we had in the seminar. That particular paper ended up getting a lot of attention. Not immediately, but very quickly. It was subsequently published in 25 or so anthologies. But keep in mind: these were the very early days of bioethics. Then four years ago, Soundings (Vol. 96, No. 3, 2013) had a retrospective on the piece with five commentators. This paper, my first significant publication, has had a good, long life.
One of the things that really interested me about that seminar was the exchange with medical and legal professionals around topics of fundamental human interest: How can we increase the supply of artificial and transplanted organs? How can we distribute the ones we have in a fair and equitable way? These two questions still persist, and require on-going reflection and resolution in light of important ethical values and technological, professional, and societal changes. I started thinking about these questions with others who were serious and wanted to make a difference in policies and practice, which I really found quite exciting. This led to other interactions with medical and health professionals, including a psychiatrist who was also a member of the seminar. Over the next few years, I published a few articles related to bioethics. The term "bioethics" wasn't even coined until that very year, 1970 — a time still early in the development of the field.
Then, in 1974, Georgetown University invited me to fill the new chair in Protestant ethics, the "Joseph P. Kennedy Professorship in Christian Ethics," located in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics; a Roman Catholic chair was held by Richard McCormick, a Jesuit. Because my little article was getting a fair amount of attention, I was invited to apply for the position. I wasn't particularly interested, because I really loved it at UVA in the new department, which was growing rapidly from the two faculty when I interviewed for the position in 1967.
L: What a neat thing to be a part of.
C: Yes, I was part of something that seemed to be developing very well. I had already become department chair in 1972 at a very early age but, having arrived so early in the department's development, I had been around for several years and had some seniority. Nevertheless, I was finding it difficult to delegate tasks to others, some of whom had been my teachers in graduate school at Yale, and I felt overworked. The research chair at Georgetown had no official obligations. I could teach if I wanted to teach, but there was no requirement to do so. This seemed to be an attractive opportunity that I should at least consider. And my late wife was also interested in the D.C. area. So, I applied. Because I wasn't particularly interested, I had a hell of an interview!
D: We would love to hear more about it.
C: Nothing really hinged on it for me, since I wasn't seeking to leave UVA. And so, I was very relaxed throughout the interview process. When the chair was offered, I did accept it and stayed there for four years. However, a major reason I hesitated at first to accept the chair is that I thought bioethics might be a passing fad and there wouldn't be a lot of interest in it long term; so I wanted to continue my other interests, as well.
I should also add that I do not think of myself as a bioethicist. I'm a person who is interested in ethics and public policy. Public policy goes in several directions. Many of the issues that concern me relate to biomedicine and healthcare, but also to questions of war and peace, among others. I consider these as two subsets of my major interest. I don't do much in clinical bioethics; what I am really focused on is public policy. My first actual experience in public policy related to bioethics came in 1975 on a topic that still hasn't been resolved: compensation for injured research subjects. Building on this experience, I wrote a paper arguing for justice-based compensation for research-related injuries. It still hasn't happened.
On Developing the Principles of Biomedical Ethics
D: What led you to exploring the field of medical ethics further?
C: One of my early tasks at Georgetown was to teach in an intensive bioethics course, which had been offered once before I got there. A philosopher at Georgetown, Tom Beauchamp, was also teaching in it, and we had very different views. In the parlance of the time, he was a rule utilitarian, and I was a rule deontologist. And yet, we found areas of fundamental agreement. I had known Tom at Yale Divinity School, before he pursued his Ph.D. degree in philosophy at Johns Hopkins. I had stayed at Yale to pursue my Ph.D. degree in religious ethics. So, we came to bioethics from different perspectives. We decided that we could develop something that might be of interest in the field, because there were very few methodological discussions at the time. Early contributors to the emerging field in the 1960's were people like Paul Ramsey and John Fletcher. They had already done a lot. I by no means consider myself a pioneer. And there was a lot of work in religious communities on medical ethics: Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. The background was already there and so I considered myself in the beginning of the next generation of people working in the field. At the time, there were only a few systematic books in medical ethics. Particularly important were those written from religious perspectives by such thinkers as Joseph Fletcher, Paul Ramsey, Jakob Jakobovitz, Gerald Kelly and John Ford among others. I recall only one systematic book looking at medical ethics from a philosophical perspective—Howard Brody wrote a physician-philosopher's book. Most of the books that were available were anthologies, organized around problem areas, such as abortion, euthanasia, allocation of resources. Tom and I wanted to offer something different. Coming from two different ethical theories, we felt we could get agreement about some important principles. We believed it was possible to get more agreement on these principles than on why we affirm them, and more agreement on these principles than on how they apply in practice. In short, we wanted to offer an ethical framework for thinking about biomedicine and health care. Tom and I published the first edition of Principles of Biomedical Ethics in 1979; seven editions have now been published and about a dozen translations into other languages have been published or are being published. At Georgetown, then, I was not forced, but rather led into working more in bioethics.
D: I was curious— you said that you don't consider yourself a bioethicist. Can you elaborate just a little more on that?
C: I don't like the term "bioethics," even though I often use it now for shorthand purposes (as in this interview). The original conception of bioethics, when the term was coined by Rensselaer Potter in 1970, was a very, very broad conception. The term I use most often, when I'm not seeking a shorthand expression, is "biomedical ethics." I have a particular reason for that. I think of biomedical ethics as parallel to business ethics, political ethics, and so forth. But to call the field bioethics— or to identify specific subsets such as neuroethics or genethics— is actually to suggest, by having using the combined words, that this is some kind of independent enterprise. I don't accept that conception. Instead, we should reflect on ethical principles, rules, and values that then get brought into play in the particular problem areas of business, politics, public policy, and biomedicine. So, that's one reason I prefer "biomedical ethics" to "bioethics," even though I know it's a losing battle because shorthand expressions are often useful. Another reason for my reluctance to call myself a bioethicist is that, again, I think of myself more as working on ethics and public policy, with biomedicine and health care being one of the subsets of this dominant interest.
Contributions to the Field
D: You talked a little bit about how this a gradual evolution of your career. You also mentioned some of the writings that you've done and the things that you published at the very beginning. What would you consider some of your major successes within your career?
C: There are some publications that I really like, including, among others, that very first little article, Principles of Biomedical Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, several editions, 1979, 1983, 1989, 1994, 2001, 2009, 2013), and an article on just-war theories (Theological Studies 39, 1979) as well as articles on conscience, organ procurement and allocation, public health ethics, etcetera. So, there are several things that I've done that I really, really like; I'm particularly proud of those. Others, I think, have been useful. I also believe my work in public policy to be important. I've been heavily involved in public policy over a number of years since that first foray in 1975. It just happens I do most of it in relation to biomedicine and healthcare. I served on President Clinton's National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) as well as on a number of other governmental committees addressing bioethical issues. Some of these were bioethical in content even if their labels do not indicate this. For example, I served on the human fetal tissue transplantation research panel and I was vice-chair of the federal taskforce on organ transplantation, as well as a number of committees for the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine). I would also consider the undergraduate courses I've taught, including Theology, Ethics, and Medicine, which I have loved teaching, to be a highlight of my career. I have also really enjoyed teaching my graduate seminars. In the spring semester, 2015, I had one of the most interesting seminars I've ever taught on Just War Theory. I had five students from philosophy, five from religious studies, two from politics and international relations, three had military backgrounds, and at least two were pacifists. It was such a rich seminar.
D: Do you choose your major topics or did they choose you?
L: It seemed to happen pretty organically.
C: "Organically" is an interesting way to put it, because certainly the first topic that lured me into the field came from the outside. It was not self-chosen and it came from the outside in more ways than one. I have definitely gravitated towards certain kinds of topics in method and theory and I've probably concentrated the most on organ transplantation—in regard to both procurement and allocation. And more recently I have focused much of my work in public health ethics.
D: From writing that very first publication to going to Georgetown and being there with basically free reign at that time, what really propelled you towards organ transplantation?
C: As I mentioned, the seminar that lured me into bioethics was on artificial and transplanted organs, so even though I wrote mainly on distribution of artificial organs, kidney dialysis in particular, I also paid attention to organ transplantation. I found that just fascinating in terms of the ways we think and feel about the human body and transfer of body parts from both living and deceased individuals. I taught a course on Human Bodies and Parts as Property several times in the 1990s and 2000s dealing with a wide range of uses of human bodies and parts, not only in transplantation, but also in research, education, and other ways, including reproduction (e.g., donor sperm and eggs and surrogacy) and plastinated body exhibits. I'm fascinated by these topics.
L: Do you have a particular piece of work that you think has had the biggest impact on the biomedical ethics field?
C: Well, I again think that Principles of Biomedical Ethics had the biggest influence. I would say the book has had the biggest impact simply because the first edition came out in 1979, it is now in the seventh edition (perhaps there will be one more!), and it has appeared in about a dozen translations into other languages. Our critics play an important role in our willingness to revise the book as we try to take account of their arguments, accept what we find helpful, and offer counterarguments where needed.
D: Are there particular things that you focus on when you're making a new edition, to tweak or change?
C: The way we start with a new edition is to see which one of us has been working on some area, and then that person develops the new draft of that specific part of a chapter or a whole chapter, based on what he's been doing. Our changes grow out of thoughts that we have developed since the previous edition and the ways we've been teaching or writing, as well our efforts to respond to critics. So, that gets the process started and then we go through draft after draft until we get the book that we together like. That's basically it.
D: So, the paths harmonize?
C: Generally, but some differences get hidden in the language. We each have an independent life. This is the only work we really collaborate on. But it has made a strong impact. The late John Arras, whom I miss a great deal, commented at one point that Principles of Biomedical Ethics was like the "Borg." This is because resistance is futile, "we're going to capture and assimilate." I was always amused by that comment. However, my counter would be that, "No, we actually try to learn from others first and see how we can adjust or refine our position rather than try to 'conquer and assimilate.'"
D: Do you feel like you also learned from Beauchamp, too, when you were both writing this together? That there were some areas where you might find some disagreement and have to find some common place?
C: Of course, we have our differences, and we sometimes paper over them, we sometimes convince the other, we sometimes wear the other out. When we started planning this book, we originally had another co-author, a psychiatrist, Seymour Perlin, working with us but he ended up not being able to continue because of other professional commitments. He was part of our early discussions and put us in contact with his editor at Oxford University Press, Jeffrey House, who had worked with him on a book on suicide. Oxford had not published any books in bioethics by the late '70s. Principles of Biomedical Ethics was its first book in bioethics, and now I can't even read all the books it publishes in this field. One nice thing about starting in 1970 was that I could read everything in a particular area in a day or so. I still probably have the eight or ten articles in a file that I read for "Who Shall Live When Not All Can Live?"— so I had to draw from other areas. For example, I didn't know that Paul Ramsey was working on similar issues at the same time --he built his reflections into his book that came out later in 1970 – Patient as Person: Explorations in Medical Ethics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970). But at the time I was drawing from Ramsey's other work on triage on the high seas, that is, throwing some passengers overboard in order to keep a lifeboat afloat. This was another allocation of a scarce resource. I not only worked with the modest literature in bioethics, but I also drew from a variety of other works to try to cast light on this particular area.
D: At the time, were you surprised that Principles of Biomedical Ethics garnered so much attention?
C: Yes, of course.
D: What do you think surprised you about that?
C: Well, I mean, you never know, when you put something out there, what kind of response it will get. Some of the best things I've written haven't received much response. Some of the more modest things have. You just never know, right? Not until it gets out there and strikes a chord—what might be useful and why something takes off and gets a lot of attention, while something else does not. It's all very puzzling. I can look back now and see why, given the fact that, again, so little had been written from a philosophical perspective that tried to offer a systematic framework for thinking about bioethics. So, that was one thing. A second thing is that both Tom and I were contributing to the work of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, which produced the Belmont Report, with its famous principles, during these years. Tom was actually a staff philosopher for the National Commission at the time and worked on the Belmont principles, which still play such an important role in research involving human subjects. "Principles" became part of the air we breathe, as it were. Principles became a helpful way to organize ethical discourse and reflection. Ours were similar, with important differences. Principles have a downside too, because as critics sometimes note, some practitioners engage in a mechanical application of the Four Principles. Two of our critics, Bernie Gert and Dan Clouser, said others were chanting the "mantra" of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice—our four principles—without really grappling with those principles. That can be a problem.
Formative Influences
L: Have you had any major influences in your life during your career and was there any work that inspired you or any people in the field or outside the field that really influenced you?
C: There were several indirect formative influences—I use the term "indirect" here because they're not so directly related to biomedical ethics but nevertheless shaped my choices, personal career, and academic life. I come from a Quaker background, but North Carolina Quakerism is a lot like any other Southern Protestant denomination. There are hired ministers, there's programmed worship with music, not what we often think of as the more traditional Quaker silent unprogrammed meeting for worship, with participants speaking out of silence. In college—at Guilford College, a Quaker school—I was further exposed to this tradition, including its critical perspective on a number of social issues, and I found it quite appealing. Also at Guilford College, I worked with several faculty members in a strong department in religious studies. I decided that I would like to teach in religious studies, preferably religious ethics. This led me to Yale Divinity School. At that time, virtually everyone interested in pursuing a Ph.D. degree in religious studies went first to divinity school. At Yale Divinity School I became even more interested in an academic career in religious ethics. Several faculty members there, as well as faculty members in college, were important. But James Gustafson was the biggest influence. He ended up being one of the key figures in the development of modern bioethics or biomedical ethics. He was part of the group with Paul Ramsey and Hans Jonas and others who helped Will Gaylin and Dan Callahan develop the Hastings Center. His influence as a teacher and a scholar was very, very important for me. But then there were many others, including David Little who advised my dissertation on civil disobedience. In divinity school and graduate school, I also learned much from my peers, such as Stanley Hauerwas. And once I started teaching, I continued to learn from colleagues and from students, both undergraduate and graduate students.
L: That is always important to keep in mind.
C: So, yes, I learned from them. Then the various other influences really came in more direct way, especially from working with Tom Beauchamp from whom I have learned so much, through debates, and through interactions with colleagues at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University where I held a research chair for four years.
L: Along with colleagues, how have your students helped to shape your opinions and beliefs on certain issues?
C: My basic conception of ethics in relation to public policy is that of public justification. Ethics involves critically reflecting on the kinds of reasons we give for the kinds of actions we propose and undertake, whether individually or publicly. I learned a lot through this reflective practice. One of the important people I learned from was Joanne Lynn, a physician-bioethicist, and a fellow at the Hastings Center. She had participated in a summer seminar I taught under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Humanities. We published an article that played an important role in the debate regarding artificial nutrition and hydration. That article really depended a great deal on her work as a very thoughtful physician. I do think dialectically, and I found our interaction to be quite valuable. I should also add, in that regard, I do a lot of team teaching. Probably more than most people. I'm not even sure I can count up the number of team taught courses.
L: Oh, that must be very fun.
D: What do you find that's valuable about team teaching?
C: It is an approach to a class that depends in part on the other person's views. And I gain a lot of insight from the other person. And, as in the seminar I took part in on artificial and transplanted organs, what I find so fascinating and illuminating is the interaction, the dialogue, and the exchange.
D: That's wonderful.
C: It fits well with part of what I find in the public policy context, where we're trying to develop a consensus statement or come as close to a consensus as possible on important matters. It's a willingness to say "I don't think that I have to have the answer, so let's together see if we can come up with an answer that's justifiable given the range of values at stake."
D: So, in this, it's affecting everyone's life. It's public policy. I can only imagine some of the very long debates or at least discussions that were had.
C: Yes, definitely.
D: Returning back to the field and your own goals, what do you see yourself focusing on next? Do you have any plans for, for instance, an issue you might want to tackle or anything?
C: Well, I'm finishing a long overdue book on Public Bioethics, which includes several articles I've previously produced or published, along with several new chapters as well. And, again, Tom Beauchamp and I may do another edition. But the next thing I want to do after Public Bioethics is a book on Just War Theory. I published a book on civil disobedience and public obligation and another on moral responsibility in conflicts. So, I've already published some materials related to this topic, but I want to pick up the 1978 article on just-war theories as well as some other articles I have written since then and rework those into a book, and, here again, respond to critics, because that one article has also been subject to a fair amount of criticism. I'll try to straighten the critics out as best as I can!
D: Big plans, as always.
Current Developments within Bioethics
L: Now we wanted to move into more about the field and your thoughts on certain topics.
D: Of course, a lot has happened since the beginning. But, specifically, in terms of the whole scope of the field, how do you think bioethics has changed over the scope of your career?
C: It's changed a lot in terms of expansion. And obviously, it got started in part because of the expanding questions that couldn't be handled well in existing frameworks. After all, medical ethics has been around a long time. Nursing ethics is not so young, either. And religious traditions have long reflected on these topics. So, why in the '60s and early '70s did bioethics develop as an area of critical reflection? Well, in part because there were new questions that had to be addressed. I think that's what was occurring in research, in developments in genetics and reproductive technology, and in organ and tissue transplantation, for example. The 1968 Harvard statement on determination of death was developed in part because of the need to be able to determine death for purposes of deceased organ donation before the organs deteriorate. We needed a way to determine death that would allow us to take the organs, with consent, in a timely way. And we had to consider the patients whose hearts were still beating because of the attached machinery. These were issues that, again, expanded the field and that expansion hasn't stopped. And so, that's where I was mistaken back in the 1970's—bioethics was not a passing fad. I didn't fully appreciate that there would continue to be new pressing issues that would require attention. For example, the last version of my Theology, Ethics and Medicine course had to be revised, because I had to discuss the new and promising gene editing techniques. Topics such as human genetic engineering continue to develop. To take another example, we thought that brain death issues were settled. They aren't; in some ways they've unraveled. Things fall apart, new things develop, and so on.
Expansion in a second sense has also occurred. The global scale or scope of bioethics has become very important in a variety of different ways through concerns about human rights and global justice. The interest in global public health is a good example—what happens in South Korea, for instance, doesn't stay in South Korea.
Expansion also occurs in devoting more attention to certain topics or areas over time. Even though I've always been interested in public policy, more attention is now paid to the public policy implications of bioethics, beyond the clinical implications. I think we have seen a broadening out to public policy combined with attention to the larger sociocultural context of bioethics, which brings into play the work of sociologists and anthropologists and others. And I think that's been a part of broadening the field.
So, those are some of the kinds of changes that I think are important. I think it is also important to recognize that bioethics has been, in many ways, limited by its origin in the U.S. with its strong individualistic thrust. In the U.S. context, for several reasons, respect for autonomy tends to be particularly emphasized. You can see why it's important, but the U.S. also tends to give it a very individualistic cast that looks very different if you're approaching this from most other countries in the world, even the U.K., with which we share a lot. I think we need more attention to community and relationships, especially relational autonomy as emphasized by feminist thinkers.
L: When you first entered the bioethics field, you mentioned organ transplantation and dialysis were the big issues that seemed to be the most pressing— the ones that need to be addressed at that time. Were there any others?
C: There were a lot of other issues related to behavior modification and emerging mental health issues that led to de-institutionalization in the '70s—so huge changes were occurring, for better or worse. To take another example, in 1973, the end-stage renal disease program was anticipated to be the first step in the direction of the universal health care in the U.S. But it turned out to be an aberration because the estimates were just wrong, and the costs were much higher than anticipated. We're still struggling and failing to provide universal access to health care.
D: Speaking a little bit about that, during that era, there were obviously some technological changes, too, that were really driving some of those issues. And technology is always changing. Going off of that, what technologies now do you really think are going to change the way that this dialogue goes? What might change the face of medicine or nursing?
C: What's going to change or what has the potential for blowing everything up is gene editing.
L: Yes, you mentioned that earlier, why do you think that?
C: In an on-going effort to make sure that genetic interventions didn't pose too much risk, scientists, ethicists, and others developed a set of distinctions that are still important. One is between somatic cell gene therapy and germ line intervention. Somatic cell alterations remain in a particular person's body; they are not passed on to others while the germ line alterations can be passed onto offspring and future generations. The other distinction is between therapy and enhancement, specifically between gene therapy and genetic enhancement. Gene editing certainly threatens the first set of distinctions, and it will probably be difficult to restrict it to therapeutic interventions, in part because the lines are not totally clear. So, gene editing is potentially transformative but also risky. Several committees and forums have addressed—and will continue to address—these topics. It's exciting, but also troubling.
L: That was actually our next question— as medicine and healthcare become more global, what do you think will be one of the really emergent issues in global ethics? I know we had Ebola in 2015, but it's interesting how the media can sort of hype something up— and then now it's not as talked about anymore. But do you foresee anything in the future?
C: No doubt there will be terrifying things to keep us anxious and active. But I think large questions about global justice are here as well. They include how we think about not only protecting ourselves from infectious diseases that might emerge and put us at risk, but also how we think about this in a global community that requires attention to health needs and threats in other countries. How can we meet broad needs on a global scale? I think those are critical questions. I don't have an easy way to address them. I think the work of Thomas Pogge points us in an important direction, by pushing us to ask what have we done to create these desperate circumstances. This framework will generate a greater obligation to try to meet needs in the global context—there are ways in which we've contributed to global problems that increase our responsibility. It's much easier to state that point than to say exactly how we should go about addressing it.
L: Is there a particular biomedical ethics issue that you feel has been under addressed by the field, specifically, or that remains the most unresolved?
C: At different times, I think it's been easier (and I've been guilty of this too) to concentrate on some "hot button topics," and not to attend as much to, say, public health infrastructure or to health equity in the U.S. or globally. For example, we don't yet have equitable access to healthcare in the United States despite Obamacare. And obviously, some of these issues have become so technical that bioethicists need to know more economics, for example, than I and most bioethicists know. I think that having people in the field who can work in different areas, but also can engage in collaborative partnerships with others to address some of these complex policies is more practical. Moreover, we find it difficult to develop a good, deliberative, and public way to deal with complex issues like gene editing. So, I think we still have a long way to go on a lot of topics.
L: To follow up, what challenges loom largest for the field right now as a whole—whether it's funding or people's differing opinions and the difficulty with coming to a consensus?
C: I'd say I've been amazed, as you probably have, too, by some of the changes that have occurred. Socially and culturally we've moved in new directions in recent years—for example, on gay marriage. And look how far we've moved, say, on physician-assisted suicide; almost every year, a new state is added to the list of states accepting it. So, it's fascinating from a sociological and anthropological standpoint to step back and consider how these changes occur over time.
D: Speaking a little bit more about the future of biomedical ethics, what do you anticipate the field looking like in the next five or ten years? Can you anticipate that at all? And do you have any caveats about looking towards the future?
C: Remember, I predicted bioethics wouldn't be around long. You probably shouldn't ask me for predictions. I'm an unreliable predictor!
D: But now you have more experience, so at least your knowledge-base to make any prediction might be more informed.
C: There is no such thing as bioethics or biomedical ethics— as you know, there are many different approaches, and many people are doing many different kinds of things under this rubric. So, a lot depends on which area one is looking at. I worry that too many entering the field are engaged in a kind of scholastic endeavor of working out further what has been done before or critiquing it. I'm more interested in how fresh perspectives come into the field. So, that's one reason I'm interested in a lot of what's happening in anthropology, for example. Different kinds of perspectives are important to keep the field fresh. I am also concerned, especially, that people narrow in on bioethics too quickly as their area of concentration. They may not get enough breadth or depth in some other areas that actually may be the ones that will shape bioethics in the future. So, that's, I guess, a sort of cautionary note.
D: On that note, what do you think makes a thorough ethicist? What sort of aspects are they considering?
C: Those of us who came into the field when I did, did not come in as bioethicists. We came in from other areas. I'd like to keep those areas fertile and add other neglected perspectives. So, that would be one of my major concerns. But I also think familiarity with the traditions of philosophical and religious reflection and with the legal context is very important. And obviously we need attention to the biological sciences and medicine and health care to be able to address bioethical issues. If bioethicists are not scientists or medical professionals, then they need to choose a few scientific or medical areas where they can gain enough competence to be able to really contribute to the discussion. There are some areas I won't lecture on in a public lecture, because I'm not sufficiently grounded to be able to avoid major misunderstandings of the problems.
D: Following up with that, when you were talking about lecturing in class, what do you think makes a good teacher of bioethics?
C: I think passion for the area can generate enthusiasm on the part of students. For instance, my course Theology, Ethics, and Medicine is aimed at creating informed citizens. Changes are occurring in education that require the teaching profession to be much more interactive than it was years ago. And so the challenge in my course has been to build in weekly film sessions and to plan the weekly discussion sections focused on cases so that even though there are two lectures a week, we can keep the course as interactive as possible. I also think that familiarity with traditions of ethical reflection, specifically in the biomedical arena, but also more broadly, is important for effective teaching.
L: Regarding what you mentioned before about new perspectives coming into the field, though it's a very diverse field, what voices do you think, if any, are not sufficiently represented today in the biomedical ethics field? And who do we need to bring in to help contribute?
C: While there is some minority participation, bioethics is a heavily white field. So, that's one fundamental issue: diversity needs to be addressed. Over time, the field has done a much better job incorporating women and women's voices than it did at the beginning. But that's in part because, insofar as physicians are contributing to bioethics, many more women are now in medicine. Yet, this is not happening to the same extent in relation to minorities.
L: Have you seen any other specific professional groups that haven't been brought in that might serve to enhance the field?
A: I like the fact that nursing students have been about 10% of my undergraduate course on bioethics. This has been important for pedagogical reasons. .
L: Since Dallas and I are both going into the healthcare, we are interested to hear if you have any advice, specifically, for medical or nursing students at the beginning years of their practice.
C: Since the demands are so heavy now on the individuals going through training, my advice is to try to keep alive the reflective and imaginative dimensions. Consider a study out of the University of Pennsylvania about how medical students thought about pelvic exams in medical training and the kind of consent needed for those exams. This study showed that the students' ethical judgments about these matters were worse after their third year than they were in their first two years of medical school.
D: In conclusion, what legacy, if any, do you want to leave in biomedical ethics?
C: I think the late Paul Ramsey, whose book The Patient as Person in 1970 was very important in the further development of medical ethics, said it best when he described writing as contributing to a conversation. So I hope I've contributed to a conversation that will continue, and I look forward to following that conversation. I hope that the students I've worked with--undergraduates, graduate students, and postgraduates—will want to contribute to that conversation too. I think there are few easy answers and in many cases no answers at all. But we have to continue to discuss and think together and try to come up with responses that appear to be justifiable in the particular circumstances. And so we contribute to the conversation... that's what I consider most important.
D: Well, you definitely have two people in this room who feel that your class and the environment that you and Professor Arras created at the University of Virginia, the bioethics culture, has been amazing, and definitely impacted a lot of people.
C: Good. We miss John, though.
D: Yes.
L: We do.
D: Well, we covered a lot of ground.
D: And I can just say that we are very honored to have been able to talk with you about this and thank you so much for contributing to this conversation.
Careers in Bioethics, James Childress
May 24 An Interview with Arthur Caplan


[The following paragraph was effective with respect to acceptance of an engagement after March 31, 1998. It was amended as a result of the adoption of Auditing Standard No. 5, effective for audits of fiscal years ending on or after November 15, 2007. See PCAOB Release 2007-005A.
AU 315.16
The successor auditor should plan and perform the reaudit in accordance with generally accepted auditing standards. The successor auditor should not assume responsibility for the predecessor auditor's work or issue a report that reflects divided responsibility as described in section 543, Part of Audit Performed by Other Independent Auditors. Furthermore, the predecessor auditor is not a specialist as defined in section 336, Using the Work of a Specialist, or an internal auditor as defined in section 322, The Auditor's Consideration of the Internal Audit Function in an Audit of Financial Statements.
Copyright © 2002, American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, Inc.


Former Glenwood Springs 'nurse' arrested as imposter
Crime | July 18, 2018
Tatiana Flowers
tflowers@postindependent.com
A former employee of Glenwood Springs Health Care at 23rd Street and Blake has been arrested for allegedly lying about being a licensed nurse after stints in both Glenwood and an assisted living facility in Evergreen.
Chelsea Self / Post Independent
A 39-year-old woman was arrested Saturday in Knox City, Texas after an investigation found she allegedly had worked as an imposter nurse at a nursing home in Glenwood Springs and an assisted living facility in Evergreen.
According to an arrest warrant, Glenwood Springs Health Care hired Heather Lee Wood, now Heather McCray, on Nov. 21, 2016 to work as an administrator in a building behind the main nursing home. The building she worked in was an assisted living facility, which closed about four months ago, a former employee said.
Some time after she was hired, she expressed interest in working as a nurse and told the facility she wanted to help alleviate problems of understaffing by filling in on nights and weekends, according to the warrant.
The documents say she had allegedly told administrators she was a certified nurse, but after an investigation officials found she hadn't been and that she had never held a nursing degree.
According to the police report, once hired as a "nurse," McCray told facility administrators she preferred payment in the form of a "bonus," instead of changing her job title, as that would have led the facility's managers to ask for her nursing credentials.
During her 11-month-long stint with Glenwood Springs Health Care, the facility's management promoted her twice, once, from administrator to "nurse," and then again, from nurse to nurse manager, according to the report.
Only after staff conducted an on-site audit did they find there was no copy of McCray's nursing credentials. When they asked her to produce it, she came up with a myriad of "random excuses" as to why she could not provide the documents, the report says.
After numerous failed attempts, building administrators say they sat McCray down in front of a computer and told her she had 30 minutes to provide proof of her nursing license, the report says. Officials say when she was unable to do so, she left the facility, and never returned.
The nursing home's administrator allegedly told police he'd provide documents that showed McCray had regularly signed off on patient medications, some of which included schedule class II drugs, but officers say they never received that information.
Facility staff said they reported McCray to the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies. The arrest warrant says, "Her actions and experience level led most other co-workers to believe that she was, in fact, licensed, even though she was not."
According to Glenwood Springs Police Chief, Terry Wilson, McCray was arrested on July 14 in Knox City, Texas on a Glenwood Springs Police Department warrant. She was lodged into jail and posted bond that same day, according to Chief Wilson. Police said she was cooperative during the arrest, Wilson said.
A recent Denver 7 investigation found it took the state almost two years to issue McCray a cease and desist order, despite multiple complaints from a resident's loved one. The TV news station said it spearheaded its own investigation after a former Glenwood Springs Health Care employee called to report the news.
Prior to working in Glenwood Springs, McCray also had worked at Elk Run Assisted Living in Evergreen in 2016, according to state documents.
At one point, according to Denver 7, McCray used another nurse's name and license number as her own, "and state regulators seemingly took her word for it."
She is charged with criminal impersonation, a class 6 felony, unlicensed practicing nurse, a class 2 misdemeanor, and unlawful distribution of a schedule II controlled substance, a class 3 drug felony.
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Eubanks: Immelmans Show their Love for America
By Steve Eubanks
Published on Wednesday, September 12, 2012
"My family and I have been so blessed with the opportunities afforded to us in this country. We love this country. It has meant so much to us. So we feel privileged to be able to give back in any way that we can, no matter how small that contribution might be."
Those words could have come from any number of great Americans, men and women who consistently sacrifice to make a positive impact on our national landscape.
But instead they came from a resident alien, a man with a Green Card and a clipped accent: South African Masters champion Trevor Immelman who, like many immigrants, articulates his love for America better than a lot of people whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower.
The venue for my conversation with Trevor was Country Club of Columbus in Georgia, close enough to Fort Benning to hear the muffled echoes of artillery rounds from the 69th Armor Regiment. Trevor was in town with his father, Johan, his mother, June, his brother, Mark, and his sister-in-law, Tracy, to promote Golf 9-12, a day of unity and remembrance in a post 9-11 world.
"Golf 9-12 was established to bring everyone together, and to use golf as a vehicle to promote that spirit of unity that we all felt the day after 9-11," Trevor told me. "My parents first moved here in 2000. My children were born here and are American citizens. So this country has been very, very good to me and to my family."
Johan Immelman launched Golf 9-12 two years ago. The original idea was to create a day of golf that would raise awareness nationally while raising funds for first responders locally.
"By focusing on first responders, and by partnering with local colleges and universities to seed scholarships for children of first responders, we feel as though Golf 9-12 gives us all a sense of worldwide unity while supporting those who are closest to a crisis when it occurs," Johan told me. "With all the many wonderful and successful charities that help our military men and women, we felt that too many first responders were being overlooked. They are the people who are running into the flames, into the danger, as we are running out. And they are the ones you call when you need help."
Events were held all across the country. The Immelmans couldn't be at all of them. They chose Columbus because Mark is an instructor there as well as being the men's golf coach at Columbus State University.
And the irony of their Cape Town roots was lost on no one.
"I feel more than a little conflicted that the three men who put this entire thing together are South African," said Brent Reid, one of the 96 players in Columbus for the event. "It's wonderful what they are doing, don't get me wrong, but it's just kind of a sad commentary that they're the ones carrying the mantle while those of us who were born here sort of stand idly by."
Not everyone born in the USA is standing by. Maj. Dan Rooney's Folds of Honor foundation has raised millions for the families of fallen servicemen. Davis Love III and his wife Robin do wonderful work through their foundation, and Butch Harmon supports scores of wounded veterans through Harmon's Heroes.
But as the color guard raised the stars and stripes, no American sang our anthem any louder than the Immelmans. And no one gives more of their time and talents than those born in other nations who understand how truly blessed we are.
"We hope that this grows from the grass roots," Johan said. "We all know how we felt on 9-12, the unity and the sense of giving that we all experienced. Hopefully we can regain that same spirit again."
Ours is a nation of immigrants, founded on ideals and not bloodlines. Families from around the world – families like the Immelmans - still come here because of those ideals.
Of all the uniquely American attributes, it is wonderful to see that one continue.


23 October 2016 24 June 2020 John Pistelli
Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist
Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney
Thinking, for what should be obvious reasons, about previous Anglophone poets who won the Nobel Prize, I decided to read this, Seamus Heaney's first collection, published in 1966. All the virtues we've heard about and know from the anthology pieces—the dense sonic texture of the poems, their thickness like that of the matter they describe, a verbal impasto thickened with slant-rhyme, alliteration, and assonance—are there in full in the poet's debut.
Two famous poems bookend the collection: "Digging," in which the poet's art is explained as a a sublimation of his father's and grandfather's rural farm labor, their traditionally masculine role that the speaker, like Hamlet and Telemachus before him, cannot adopt for himself ("But I've no spade to follow men like them"), as a substitute for which he supplies his pen in place of their excavator's tool; and "Personal Helicon," in which the poet's art is explained as a sublimation of his own childhood play, when he would "pry into roots," "finger slime," and "stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring"—now that these occupations are "beneath all adult dignity," he makes rhymes instead, "to set the darkness echoing," reprising juvenile narcissism as adult creation.
In these poems, Heaney seems to see poetry as a modest art: in naturalizing his art, Heaney eschews the visionary quality of Shelley or Yeats, the social mission theorized by Wordsworth or Eliot. But Heaney's view of a poetry that grows organically out of the soil and slime, out of the roots and wells—and which is linked to sexual processes and development (his father's spade and his own pen are phalluses, just his earlier "pry[ing] into roots" is masturbation)—reconceives the poet's vocation as an adjunct to the growth of the nation from its native soil, the evolution of labor into art and narcissism into generation. In the guise of modesty, Heaney travels as postcolonial bard rhyming the suppressed nation into a new existence.
Several poems toward the end of the collection reinforce Heaney's understanding of poetry as he canvasses and dismisses alternative approaches. "Saint Francis and the Birds" envisions poetry as a completely natural and also holy act—the saint's demonstration of love by releasing the birds into the air: they "like images took flight"—a beautiful gesture, obviously unavailable in the middle twentieth century. "In Small Townlands," evoking an itinerant painter, gives us the artist as visionary, forging the landscape in perceiving it—
His eyes, thick, greedy lenses, fire
This bare bald earth with white and red,
Incinerate it till it's black
And brilliant as a funeral pyre:
A new world cools out of his head.
—precisely the Yeatsian idealism Heaney refuses for himself, because its perception is "greedy" and because it arrogantly kills the landscape to recreate it. And in "The Folk Singers," Heaney shows himself not to be a simple-minded populist, as he scorns the arts of the volk as "narcotic strumming" that "strikes a pose / Like any rustic new to the bright town," a pleasing minstrelsy implicitly far inferior to the modern poet's conscious artistry, which enlivens rather than pacifying the audience and challenges their image of the patria rather than reifying it.
"Poem," dedicated to Heaney's wife, is generically titled because it reaffirms the logic underlying the others as the speaker tells us that his childhood construction of mud fortifications is fulfilled in adulthood by his marriage, "within our golden ring"—which, as readers of Shakespeare will remember, is synonymous with the vagina. Having attained via the pen the phallus, the poet now completes the circuit and generates both poetry and progeny.
With his poetic authority certified, Heaney can pronounce on political matters. There are public poems in the collection, some more successful than others. Two poems about the potato famine: "At a Potato Digging" captures the blight in the other nature poem's grotesque imagery that suggests the national history explaining just why Heaney's pastoral is in general so Gothic ("you still smell the running sore"); and "For the Commander of the Eliza," about an English ship captain who wanted to aid the starving Irish but knew that he could not because he would be refused by his superiors in the name of laissez-faire, is an outraged satire on the rational calculating intellect to which the poetic mind, with its rhyming and ringing, is subliminally opposed:
Sir James, I understand, urged free relief
For famine victims in the Westport Sector
And earned tart reprimand from good Whitehall.
Let natives prosper by their own exertions;
Who could not swim might go ahead and sink.
"The Coast Guard with their zeal and activity
Are too lavish" were the words, I think.
Other public poems are less successful, particularly "Docker," a condescending portrait of a violent Protestant laborer in a pub ("Mosaic imperatives bang home like rivets; / God is a foreman with certain definite views").
One of the collection's most famous poems, "Mid-Term Break," about the death of the poet's brother in childhood, is universally celebrated, but I have to say, at the risk of sounding heartless, I do not care for it. Just as certain forms of humility are self-aggrandizing, certain modes of artistic restraint indulge sentimentality by other means, and the poem's celebrated last line, faux-laconically explaining the significance of the length of the child's coffin, "A four foot box, a foot for every year," makes me feel like Oscar Wilde reading about the death of Little Nell.
The collection is called Death of a Naturalist because the naturalist had to die for the poet to be born. The poet, though, is at his best in his poems of nature, whether seen in the wild or transfigured through rural labor. For the pastoral poet to be sovereign in the nation, the sovereignty of nature must be circumscribed by the poems. But for poetry to be great rather than merely good, the poet must testify to what he cannot master—the repressed has to return, otherwise we could just content ourselves with folk songs and church sermons and the language of state. Where does this happen in Death of a Naturalist?
Everywhere, and from the start. In "Digging," the poet's pen is not only his father's spade, but the nationalist or revolutionary's gun—poetry is sublimated labor and also sublimated violence, which is the hopeful reading of the simile describing the pen ("snug as gun"), but a less hopeful reading tells us that violence no less than art comes out of soil and tradition. A tour-de-force poem about trout systematically compare the fish themselves to guns, finding the supposed artifice of men's violence far further down the evolutionary scale; and the extraordinary poem about drowning cats, "The Early Purges," will prevent anyone from romanticizing rusticity even as its hard-headed pragmatism forbids the urban liberal from looking down his nose:
Still, living displaces false sentiments
And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown
I just shrug, 'Bloody pups'. It makes sense:
'Prevention of cruelty' talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.
Now we are prepared to understand the title poem, in which the speaker, the little boy-naturalist, finds his love of slimy nature defeated (and simultaneously assumed into poetry) when he encounters the real monarchs of the landscape:
Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
This is not the Romantic sublime, which, while lordly, is clean and purifying and kin to the poet's imagination; for Heaney, the imagination itself is the product of a muck and a slime and a scum and a sex of which it will never be lord, and which forges rings and guns and poems as it spawns the formless frogs. Hooped in slant rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, the "great slime kings" are recreated in sound, a poetic act more like ancient rite of propitiation than the state-of-the-art gestures Heaney elsewhere adopts as Nobel-worthy poet of postcolonialism. The gun is in the landscape, the frog is in the poem, you fuck and you fight within the golden ring—the bard's authority is much less absolute than it seems, and here Heaney attains a real modesty, not the fashionable, phony diffidence of the postmodern artist but the panic (from Pan, delirium-inducing god of nature and sex) of the boy eye-to-eye with the vast inhumanity that underlies all seeming sense and meaning.
I end with the collection's penultimate poem, "The Play Way," a reminiscence of Heaney's days as a schoolteacher (he sportively toys with Eliot: "Mixing memory and desire with chalk dust") when he would have his students do a free-writing exercise while listening to Beethoven. His student's response, as the "big sound" "silenc[es] them," is obviously the response Heaney hopes to elicit from his readers—not the pacifications of folk song or the obeisance due the visionary, but thoughtful, troubled reflection, as of the child's face in the well, shattered by nature or by his own falling body:
A silence charged with sweetness
Breaks short on lost faces where I see
New looks. Then notes stretch taut as snares. They trip
To fall into themselves unknowingly.
Irish Literature
Previous Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
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William Butler Yeats, The Tower | John Pistelli says:
[…] my review of Seamus Heaney's Death of a Naturalist, I casually referred to "Yeatsian […]
Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye | John Pistelli says:
[…] and have written with admiration in just the last few weeks of writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Seamus Heaney, William Butler Yeats, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg who perceive inhuman powers at work in the cosmos […]
Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine | John Pistelli says:
[…] some other great writers in the era of high multiculturalism, such as Heaney, Morrison, or Walcott, Erdrich does not seem to trade in a politics of nation, race, ethnicity or […]


The Gatekeeper's Descendants
by Johanna Frank
Gift of Diamonds
by Roberta Seret
Things are Shaking
by Lois Wickstrom
Gifts of a Dark God
by Norman Westhoff
Mind, Body, World
by William X. Adams
by Michael Pace, Brian Paglinco
Empyrean Born
by M. K. Hall
Finding 42
by Benny Mailman
Twisted Maze
by Chris Black
by Drew Kientz
Living Vessel
by LaQuisha Barnes
Bias Is All Around You
by Erik Bean
by Rick Stepp-Bolling
The Shadow War
by Steven Cortinas
Self Love Notes
by Michelle G Stradford
by James Fox
Glimpses... Now I Can See
by Elizabeth A Roberts
Risking Is Better Than Regretting
by Cornelia E. Davis
Dell's Leap
by ML Biddison
Giving Grief Meaning
by Lily Dulan
This Last Chance
by D.L. Finn
Contact Author - D.L. Finn
Reviewed by Ankita Shukla for Readers' Favorite
This Last Chance by D.L. Finn presents a delectable combination of thriller and paranormal plots that surround the protagonist, Amber. Ever since Amber's sister, Iris, was murdered, Amber has been looking for answers. On the sixth-month anniversary of Iris's brutal killing, she sensed danger lurking around her. She reported the strange occurrences to the cops and her colleagues, but none of them believed her. Frustrated by a lack of answers, she decided to hire a private detective to at least put a face and a name to Iris' killer. However, fate had different plans for her. Yet, all was not lost for Amber. Unbeknownst to her, angels were doing everything in their power to protect her. Besides these mystical beings, one of the evildwels, a creature who fed on fear and pain, was feeling protective toward Amber. This attraction brought it both fear and hope.
This Last Chance has just the right ingredients that make a book a compelling page-turner. The introduction of a paranormal entity is definitely a stroke of genius. If the suspense of the killer didn't tempt the audience enough, which was definitely not the case, the urge to know more about this creature proved to be beyond words. Contrary to the other evildwels and their inherent desire to feed on pain and fear, Nester surrendered to his attraction toward good. Nevertheless, this surrender posed a threat to his existence. D.L. Finn infused enough personality in Nester to make the audience empathetic toward him. Whether it's attention-seeking Britany or a charming senator, each side character managed to bring diversity to the plot. At the same time, every single one of them remained a suspect in the eyes of both the protagonist and the audience. D.L. Finn has excelled in creating engaging conversations and stimulating scenes. The meticulous blend of paranormal and thriller elements has created a fascinating read. Moving at a steady pace, This Last Chance by D.L. Finn is an engrossing thriller that readers will love and recommend to others.
This Last Chance is a work of fiction in the paranormal and mystery subgenres and was penned by author D. L. Finn. In a dark fantasy mystery with plenty of bite, we find ourselves in the presence of protagonist Amber, a woman on a mission. Still reeling from the brutal murder of her sister, six months after the incident Amber wants answers for herself and intends on hiring a detective to investigate. But when a huge snowstorm sees her plans derailed and Amber is trapped with new people that she neither knows nor trusts, a battle of good versus evil begins to brew. What results is a chilling battle of wits and a slow-burning paranormal mystery to be unraveled.
Author D. L. Finn has crafted a highly engaging work that darkens and deepens as it progresses. One of the things I most admired about this book was the seamless interweaving of paranormal and fantasy elements into an emotive tale of investigation and the search for justice: an unusual blending of genres that really works. The atmosphere of the snowstorm is a fantastic premise, one which builds huge amounts of tension for those who are trapped together and motivates us to stick with our hero Amber, and root for her all the more in diverse circumstances. The descriptive work by Finn is atmospheric, with well-chosen lexis that creates cinematic images in the mind of the reader. Overall, I'd highly recommend This Last Chance as a highly engaging paranormal read for mystery fans everywhere.
Sherri Fulmer Moorer
Amber is trying to move on after her sister, Iris, is brutally murdered in an alley. She has a good job at a newspaper and wonderful (if clingy) friends who are dedicated to helping her heal. Still, she's haunted by the fact that her sister's murderer was never captured. Six months after the murder, she is followed by a masked stranger when leaving work and finds several clues in the parking garage connected with Iris's murder. The weekend grows stranger when she meets her mysterious new neighbor and receives a call from her sister's former employer, now a Presidential candidate, on the same afternoon. A series of coincidences leads Amber to a house full of guests during a brutal winter storm, but is it a coincidence? It turns out that a larger battle is taking place between angels and evil beings who feed on the hurt and pain of humans. What will happen as these worlds collide? Find out in This Last Chance by D.L. Finn.
I liked This Last Chance because it's a unique story that mixes the normal and paranormal without the amount of unbelievable crossover that you typically see in paranormal titles. It draws on images that readers will be familiar with no matter what their spiritual beliefs are, and crosses over into reality in ways that most of us imagine are actually happening. It's a great, compelling mystery that draws on a lot of Amber's family history but more than that, it shows how the worlds cross over in balancing the forces of good and evil. If you like paranormal books and mysteries, then this is a good read. D.L. Finn did an excellent job of creating a unique, compelling tale.