Free Republic

In my experience with those who wrestle with conversion to Roman Catholicism—at least those who have professed faith in the gospel, the driving theological issue is authority. How can I be certain that what I believe is true? The gospel of free grace through the justification of sinners in Christ alone moves to the back seat. Instead of the horse, it becomes the cart. Adjustments are made in their understanding of the gospel after accepting Rome’s arguments against sola scriptura. I address these remarks to friends struggling with that issue. Reformation Christians can agree with Augustine when he said that...

High levels of vitamin D in the bloodstream appear to be associated with a decreased risk of developing early age-related macular degeneration among women younger than 75 years, according to a report in the April issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. "Age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a chronic, late-onset disease that results in degeneration of the macula, is the leading cause of adult irreversible vision loss in developed countries," the authors write as background information in the article. "Age-related macular degeneration affects approximately 9 percent (8.5 million) of Americans aged 40 years and older." Amy E. Millen,...

In 1898, German doctors fed fresh cow ovaries to a young woman suffering from severe hot flashes after having her ovaries removed. It was a milestone of sorts in women’s medicine, leading to crude hormone treatments and eventually commercially prepared drugs to relieve the symptoms of menopause. It was also the beginning of a seemingly endless controversy about the safety and necessity of drug treatments for women at the end of their reproductive years. By the 1960s, pharmaceutical companies and doctors were promoting hormones as a way for women to stay “feminine forever,” even as scientists and women’s health activists...

Hormone treatment after menopause, already known to increase the risk of breast cancer, also makes it more likely that the cancer will be advanced and deadly, a study finds. Women who took hormones and developed breast cancer were more likely to have cancerous lymph nodes, a sign of more advanced disease, and were more likely to die from the disease than were breast cancer patients who had never taken hormones. The increased risks were relatively small and are not fully understood. But previous research has found that hormone treatment can cause delays in diagnosis by increasing breast density, making tumors...

SAN ANTONIO — Two new statistical analyses of Women's Health Initiative data persuasively indicate that the recent abrupt decline in breast cancer incidence in the United States is attributable to a dramatic drop in the use of estrogen-plus-progestin menopausal hormone therapy, and not—as skeptics have argued—to less utilization of mammography. Academic fencing over causality aside, the practical take-home message from the latest Women's Health Initiative (WHI) data analyses is that the breast cancer risk imparted by hormone therapy rises sooner and more steeply than previously recognized, and it swiftly declines after HT is discontinued, Dr. Rowan T. Chlebowski said at...

Associated Press SAN ANTONIO: Taking menopause hormones for five years doubles the risk for breast cancer, according to a new analysis of a big federal study that reveals the most dramatic evidence yet of the dangers of these still-popular pills. Even women who took estrogen and progestin pills for as little as a couple of years had a greater chance of getting cancer. And when they stopped taking them, their odds quickly improved, returning to a normal risk level roughly two years after quitting. Collectively, these new findings are likely to end any doubt that the risks outweigh the benefits...

Obsessed with Rapture Hello and welcome to another broadcast of the White Horse Inn. Like many kids growing up in the wake of Hal Lindsey's best-seller Late Great Planet Earth, I recall waking up in the middle of the night, startled by the thought that my parents had been raptured and I'd been left behind. Maybe I was a little more exposed than the average evangelical 11 or 12 year-old. My parents managed a camp for disadvantaged inner-city kids from the S. F. Bay Area at Lake Tahoe. And every summer we had about 4 sessions, repeating the same cycle...

Hello and welcome to another edition of the White Horse Inn. In our last couple of programs we have been talking about Pelagianism, its history, the nature of the heresy of Pelagianism, and the way it cashes out in contemporary American Christianity. We were talking in the last program particularly about how consistent the 19th century revivalist Charles Finney was in applying his theology to practice. He actually believed that essentially we save our selves, by following the example of Christ; exactly as Pelagius taught, and he totally transformed the view of the ministry in order to be consistent with...

WASHINGTON, June 28 (Reuters) - Hormone replacement therapy may be especially dangerous for older women with diabetes, researchers said Monday. A group of doctors led by Barbara Howard, president of MedStar Research Institute in Washington, studied 423 women past menopause who had atherosclerosis, a hardening of the arteries. The women who had abnormal glucose tolerance - meaning that they had diabetes or a precursor - and who took hormones had changes in their blood suggesting they had a higher risk of heart disease, Dr. Howard's team reported in the American Heart Association journal Circulation. The study was based on an...