Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 crisis and on the basis of New Testament text examples (Mark 3:1-6; 2:2328; 1 Cor. 8), the article reflects the relationships between health/healing and eschatology, theology of creation, law, and politics. It is argued that the experience of the global crisis of 2020 is forcing the global community to reconsider its modes of living, with alternative visions required. New Testament hermeneutics can contribute impulses to the global and crosscultural discourse about change regarding, for example, the perception of health and healing, the ethics of human kindness, the design and application of laws, the limits of freedom, the role of the notion of "God", and the First Commandment in secular societies or the role of often absolutised principles such as maximisation of profit and efficiency.

The essay investigates if and how Greco-Roman theorists attempted to motivate altruistic behaviour and devise a social-welfare ethics. In comparison, it studies actual social-welfare practices on both the private and the state level. Various social-welfare tasks are touched upon - health care; care for the elderly, widows, orphans and invalids; the patron-client system as countermeasure to unemployment; distribution of land, grain, meals and money; alms, donations, foundations as well as education - with hardly any one of them being especially tailored to the poor. The enormous role of civil society - private persons, their households and associations - in holding up social-welfare functions is shown. By contrast, the state was comparatively less involved, the commonwealth of the Romans, especially in Republican times, even less than the Greek city-states. The Greek poleis often invested income such as wealthy citizens' donations in social welfare, thus brokering between wealthy private donors and less well-to-do persons. The church, living in private household structures during the first centuries, took over the social-welfare tasks of the Greco-Roman household and reviewed them in the light of Hebrew and Hellenistic-Jewish moral traditions.

While the introduction compares the Heidelberg Catechism's theologically framed concept of sin with similar and opposing secular views of the past (e.g., Plautus, Quintilian, Hobbes), the main part uses contemporary scientific studies to challenge the Catechism's view that (after alienation from God in the Fall) all human individuals by birth are wicked: incapable of loving others. Studies discovered remarkable capacities of empathy and altruism already in young children of different cultures as well as in primates, suggesting that altruism is deep-rooted in common ancestors of humans and primates. However, humans encounter limits of their capacity for altruism especially when dealing with outsiders not belonging to their own group. Culture, especially religion, is needed to advance a systematic, and not just spontaneous, altruism reaching beyond one's group boundaries. Concluding remarks, using Paul, roughly sketch what a modern harmatiology would have to emphasize if it is not moral corruptness.

After discussing three models defining the relationship between rhetoric (linguistic form, verba) and theology (content, res) in scholarship's history (part I), a theoretical discussion attempts to further undergird the third model according to which verba produce res (part II). As a first step, the inseparable intertwinement of res and verba is shown by empirical studies. The linguistic form always carries unspoken semantic content. Altering this form changes the content, even if a phrase's logical meaning remains the same. As a farther-reaching second step, constructivist philosophy of language is used, holding that language creates reality. "Reality" is defined as constructed by the brain and language and differentiated from ontic reality. Four sources of evidence are identified that make such reality constructs plausible to groups. Part III discusses the theological concept of "new creation" in light of the second part's findings. Part IV shows a way to overcome postmodern indifference with regard to "truth."

Although gap junction channels are still widely viewed as large, non-specific pores connecting cells, the diversity in the connexin family has led more attention to be focused on their permeability characteristics. We summarize here the current status of these investigations, both published and on-going, that reveal both charge and size selectivity between gap junction channels composed of different connexins. In particular, this review will focus on quantitative approaches that monitor the expression level of the connexins, so that it is clear that differences that are seen can be attributed to channel properties. The degree of selectivity that is observed is modest compared to other channels, but is likely to be significant for biological molecules that are labile within the cell. Of particular relevance to the in vivo function of gap junctions, recent studies are summarized that demonstrate that the connexin phenotype can control the nature of the endogenous traffic between cells, with consequent effects on biological effects of gap junctions such as tumor suppression.