This book presents a unique historical study on the origins of longevity risk management and its links to religious institutions in the eighteenth century. Throughout history, monarchs, affluent patrons, and wealthy benefactors routinely pledged to provide their devotees with pensions or life annuities, mirroring the biblical concept of ‘daily bread for life’. Until the eighteenth century, however, the uncertainty around the longevity of beneficiaries’ lives and the difficulty of budgeting for random financial obligations had posed economic challenges that often led to insufficient funding and high default rates. This book narrates the genesis of longevity risk pooling and the first successfully funded annuity scheme in history, an eventual prototype for national pension plans around the world. It examines how a group of Protestant clergymen, scientists, and intellectuals associated with the Presbyterian Church of Scotland pioneered innovative methods for setting up a reversionary annuity and widow’s pension plan, guided by actuarial principles. Unknown to many, the economist Adam Smith, and other literati of the Scottish Enlightenment, invested in this novel annuity. Illuminating the social and theological contexts of this scheme, the book argues that religious belief played a critical role in the development of best practices around the prudent management of longevity risk. The practices, values and beliefs in divine probabilities were at the heart of these thought leaders’ confidence in long-term financial projections. Shedding light on this fascinating aspect of actuarial history by an examination of the archival records, while also linking to contextual discussions of modern pension challenges, this book will be of interest to scholars and readers interested in finance, insurance, pensions, and religion.

Explores the historical origins of Syria's religious sects and their dominance of the Syrian social scene. It identifies their distinct beliefs and relates how the actions of the religious authorities and political entrepreneurs acting on behalf of their sects expose them to sectarian violence, culminating in the dissolution of the nation-state.

Space sharing by groups is widespread in the United States, from commercial partnerships, to government and private sector joint use agreements, to the use of public facilities and commons. All space-sharing arrangements are similar in most respects, so what difference does it make when religious groups are involved?

A recurrent trope in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction compares reading to traveling and asserts that the pleasures of novel-reading are similar to the joys of a carriage journey. Kyoko Takanashi points to how these narratives also, however, draw attention to the limits of access often experienced in travel, and she demonstrates the ways in which the realist novel, too, is marked by issues of access both symbolic and material. Limited Access draws on media studies and the history of books and reading to bring to life a history of realism concerned with the inclusivity of readers. Examining works by Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot, Takanashi shows how novelists employed metaphors of transport to constantly reassess what readers could and could not access. She gives serious attention to marginalized readers figured within the text, highlighting their importance and how writers were concerned about the "limited access" of readers to their novels. Discussions of transport allowed novelists to think about mediation, and, as this study shows, these concerns about access became part of the rise of the novel and the history of realism in a way that literary history has not yet recognized.

Essays from former students of Donald G. Mathews on topics in Southern religion Comprising essays written by former students of Donald G. Mathews, a distinguished historian of religion in the South, Varieties of Southern Religious History offers rich insight into the social and cultural history of the United States. Fifteen essays, edited by Regina D. Sullivan and Monte Harrell Hampton, offer fresh and insightful interpretations in the fields of U. S. religious history, women's history, and African American history from the colonial era to the twentieth century. Emerging scholars as well as established authors examine a range of topics on the cultural and social history of the South and the religious history of the United States. Essays on new topics include a consideration of Kentucky Presbyterians and their reaction to the rising pluralism of the early nineteenth century. Gerald Wilson offers an analysis of anti-Catholic bias in North Carolina during the twentieth century, and Mary Frederickson examines the rhetoric of death in contemporary correspondence. There are also reinterpretations of subjects such as late-eighteenth-century Ohio Valley missionaries Lorenzo and Peggy Dow, a recontextualization of Millerism, and new scholarship on the appeal of spiritualism in the South. Historians of U.S. women examine how individuals struggled with gender conventions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Robert Martin and Cheryl Junk, touching on how women struggled with the gender convictions, discuss Anne Wittenmyer and Frances Bumpass, respectively, demonstrating how religious ideology both provided space for these women to move into new roles and yet limited their activities to specific realms. Emily Bingham offers a study of how her forebear Henrietta Bingham challenged gender roles in the early twentieth century. Historians of African American history offer provocative revisions of key topics. Larry Tise explores the complex religious, social, and political issues faced by late-eighteenth-century slaveholding Quakers. Monte Hampton traces the transition of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina, from a biracial congregation to an all-black church by 1835. Wayne Durrill and Thomas Mainwaring present reinterpretations of well-studied subjects: the Nat Turner rebellion and the Underground Railroad. This collection provides fresh insight into a variety of topics in honor of Donald G. Mathews and his legacy as a scholar of southern religion.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

The 800 years of scientific breakthroughs that will help salvage your retirement plans Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, Biology; every field has its intellectual giants who made breakthrough discoveries that changed the course of history. What about the topic of retirement planning? Is it a science? Or is retirement income planning just a collection of rules-of-thumb, financial products and sales pitches? In The 7 Most Important Equations for Your Retirement...And the Stories Behind Them Moshe Milevsky argues that twenty first century retirement income planning is indeed a science and has its foundations in the work of great sages who made conceptual and controversial breakthroughs over the last eight centuries. In the book Milevsky highlights the work of seven scholars—summarized by seven equations—who shaped all modern retirement calculations. He tells the stories of Leonardo Fibonnaci the Italian businessman; Benjamin Gompertz the gentleman actuary; Edmund Halley the astronomer; Irving Fisher the stock jock; Paul Samuelson the economic guru; Solomon Heubner the insurance and marketing visionary, and Andrey Kolmogorov the Russian mathematical genius—all giants in their respective fields who collectively laid the foundations for modern retirement income planning. With baby boomers starting to hit retirement age, planning for retirement income has become a hot topic across the country Author Moshe Milevsky is an internationally-respected financial expert with the knowledge you need to assess whether you are ready to retire or not Presents an entertaining, informative narrative approach to financial planning Understanding the ideas behind these seven foundation equations—which Moshe Milevsky explains in a manner that everyone can appreciate—will help baby boomers better prepare for retirement. This is a book unlike anything you have ever read on retirement planning. Think Suze Orman meets Stephen Hawking. If you ever wondered what the point of all that high school mathematics was, Moshe Milevsky's answer is: So that you can figure out how to retire...while you can still enjoy your money.

Guarantee your retirement income with a DIY pension Pensionize Your Nest Egg describes how adding the new approach of "product allocation" to the tried-and-true asset allocation approach can help protect you from the risk of outliving your savings, while maximizing your income in retirement. This book demonstrates that it isn't the investor with the most money who necessarily has the best retirement income plan. Instead, it's the investor who owns the right type of investment and insurance products, and uses product allocation to allocate the right amounts, at the right time, to each product category. This revised second edition is expanded to include investors throughout the English-speaking world and updated to reflect current economic realities. Readers will learn how to distinguish between the various types of retirement income products available today, including life annuities and variable annuities with living income benefits, and how to evaluate the features that are most important to meet their personal retirement goals. Evaluate the impacts of longevity, inflation, and sequence of returns risk on your retirement income portfolio Make sense of the bewildering array of today's retirement income products Measure and maximize your Retirement Sustainability Quotient Learn how your product allocation choices can help maximize current income or financial legacy — and how to select the approach that's right for you Walk through detailed case studies to explore how to pensionize your nest egg using the new product allocation approach Whether you do it yourself or work with a financial advisor, Pensionize Your Nest Egg gives you a step-by-step plan to create a guaranteed retirement income for life.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Notwithstanding the terrible price the world has paid in the coronavirus pandemic, the fact remains that longevity at older ages is likely to continue to rise in the medium and longer term. This volume explores how the private and public sectors can collaborate via public-private partnerships (PPPs) to develop new mechanisms to reduce older people's risk of outliving their assets in later life. As this volume shows, PPPs typically involve shared government financing alongside private sector partner expertise, management responsibility, and accountability. In addition to offering empirical evidence on examples where this is working well, contributors provide case studies, discuss survey results, and examine a variety of different financial and insurance products to better meet the needs of the aging population. This volume will be informative to researchers, plan sponsors, students, and policymakers seeking to enhance retirement plan offerings.