Contemporary culture is permeated with the caustic message that nothing is more important than youth, and that the natural aging process is to be dreaded, denied, postponed, avoided at all costs. The media crams our minds full of dreadful data of aging as a dire collection of disease, devastation, and loss. Cultural perspectives foster a fear of aging which dramatically affects our experience of growing older. Despite those gloom and doom prognostications, a positive and life-affirming perception of aging is taking root in America and around the globe. A much-needed shift is emerging; a cultural shift that views growing older not as a relentless march to the grave, but as a fresh opportunity for using our increased life span to explore new levels of awareness and personal power. The truth is that we weren't created to blossom early and then spend the rest of our life withering away. The time has come to challenge the myth of decline and to celebrate our new gift of longevity which is truly wondrous.

Warren Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov argue for a new way to measure individual and population aging. Instead of counting how many years we've lived, we should think about our "prospective age"--the number of years we expect to have left. Their pioneering model can generate better demographic estimates, which inform better policy choices.

When Anne Robertson asked a bunch of people on the street what came to mind when they heard the word Bible, she was met with a flood of mixed responses, including "wisdom," "truth," and "love", but also such words as "myth," "lies," "bigotry," and "poison." What she realized was that we all read the Bible through filtered lenses, according to our varied expectations of what the Bible is or should be. But, as Robertson shows here, the Bible as a whole is primarily God's story--a story of relationship, community, and love. Robertson's New Vision for an Old Story gives readers the right lenses to see beyond the printed page to the God who encounters us in dynamic relationship and transforms our lives. The very nature and message of Scripture are rooted in incarnation. When we need to navigate community, truth, fear, and suffering, the Bible-- God's own story--can guide us through it all.

As the number of older persons experiencing vision loss continues to soar over the upcoming years, all of us may find that a family member or friend we care about has become visually impaired. Aging and Vision Loss contains reassuring, supportive, and helpful information on meeting the needs of the older person and family caregivers as well.

James M. Houston and Michael Parker believe now is the time for the church to offer ministry to its increasing numbers of seniors and to benefit from ministry they can offer. They issue an urgent call to reconceive the place and part of the elderly in the local congregation, showing that seniors aren't the problem--they are the solution.

From two leading experts, a revolutionary new way to think about and measure aging. Aging is a complex phenomenon. We usually think of chronological age as a benchmark, but it is actually a backward way of defining lifespan. It tells us how long we’ve lived so far, but what about the rest of our lives? In this pathbreaking book, Warren C. Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov provide a new way to measure individual and population aging. Instead of counting how many years we’ve lived, we should think about the number of years we have left, our “prospective age.” Two people who share the same chronological age probably have different prospective ages, because one will outlive the other. Combining their forward-thinking measure of our remaining years with other health metrics, Sanderson and Scherbov show how we can generate better demographic estimates, which inform better policies. Measuring prospective age helps make sense of observed patterns of survival, reorients understanding of health in old age, and clarifies the burden of old-age dependency. The metric also brings valuable data to debates over equitable intergenerational pensions. Sanderson and Scherbov’s pioneering model has already been adopted by the United Nations. Prospective Longevity offers us all an opportunity to rethink aging, so that we can make the right choices for our societal and economic health.

Originally published in 1989, Day Brought Back My Night explores the lives of people who have lost sight in late life as a result of age-related visual disorders. As life-expectancy in western society has increased, the number of people who fall into this group has grown, yet little had been written on this plight. This major study filled the gap in the literature, and will still be of great value to practitioners, scholars, and students in the fields of social gerontology, medicine, social work, and nursing. Stephen Ainlay surveys the various etiologies of age-related visual disorders and establishes the medical framework of the problem. His primary concern, however, is to understand people’s experience of vision loss, and he makes use of extensive interview data to establish the ways in which people come to terms with their own aging. The stories told here reflect people’s responses to a changing body as well as shifting relationships with friends, family members, medical practitioners, and service providers. They reveal hopes and fears, lost priorities, and new initiatives, relationships that recede and relationships that are newly established. Above all, they comment on the drama that is involved in people’s struggle to find continuity in their lives. In this way, the book is as much an exploration into the problem of identity as it is a study of sensory loss in later life.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction A New York Times Bestseller Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Winner of the WSU AOS Bonner Book Award Winner of the 2022 At Home With Growing Older Impact Award As revelatory as Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, physician and award-winning author Louise Aronson's Elderhood is an essential, empathetic look at a vital but often disparaged stage of life. For more than 5,000 years, "old" has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we've made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, denigrated, neglected, and denied. Reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, noted Harvard-trained geriatrician Louise Aronson uses stories from her quarter century of caring for patients, and draws from history, science, literature, popular culture, and her own life to weave a vision of old age that's neither nightmare nor utopian fantasy--a vision full of joy, wonder, frustration, outrage, and hope about aging, medicine, and humanity itself. Elderhood is for anyone who is, in the author's own words, "an aging, i.e., still-breathing human being."