The shortage of affordable housing in cities is one of the most significant global challenges. It affects 1.6 billion people ( one- third of urban population) and is a key priority for policy change identified by the United Nations in the New Urban Agenda ( Tsenkova, 2016). Globally, cities and central governments have championed housing strategies and action plans, with a strong…
The business of journalism has an extensive, storied, and often romanticized history. Newspaper reporting has long shaped the way that we see the world, played key roles in exposing scandals, and has even been alleged to influence international policy. The past several years have seen the newspaper industry in a state of crisis, with Twitter and Facebook ushering in the rise of citizen journali…
f a poll were carried out to establish which form of manuscript, the codex or the roll, the public associated more with the Middle Ages, the result would probably see the codex taking most votes. A monk handling a codex is a stereotypical image of and for the Middle Ages promoted by medieval evidence as much as by modern movie productions such as the film adaptation…
The spread of capitalism worldwide has made people wealthier than ever before. But capitalism’s future is far from assured. The global financial meltdown of 2008 nearly produced a great depression. Economies in Europe are still teetering. Income inequality, resource depletion, mass migrations from poor to rich countries, religious fundamentalism?these are just a few of the threats to continui…
Modern Western culture is inordinately present-minded. Politicians are ignorant of the past. School curricula foreshorten the historical record by focusing on recent events. People lack a sense of their location in time and fail to perceive that contemporary society is constrained by its cultural as well as its biological inheritance. Many historians of the white South African establishment sta…
In a presentation to the Lausanne Younger Leaders’ gathering in Indonesia during August 2016 on the state of the church, Jason Mandryk, of Operation World, asserted that bythe year 2020, 80% of the world’s Christians would come from what is known as the Global South (Africa, Asia and Latin America). In the year 1900, there were reportedly around 9 million Christians …