This 12-week, prospective, randomised, controlled multi-centre study compared the proportion of healed diabetic foot ulcers and mean healing time between patients receiving acellular matrix (AM) (study group) and standard of care (control group) therapies. Eighty-six patients were randomised into study (47 patients) and control (39 patients) groups. No significant differences in demographics or pre-treatment ulcer data were calculated. Complete healing and mean healing time were 69.6% and 5.7 weeks, respectively, for the study group and 46.2% and 6.8 weeks, respectively, for the control group. The proportion of healed ulcers between the groups was statistically significant (P = 0.0289), with odds of healing in the study group 2.7 times higher than in the control group. Kaplan-Meier survivorship analysis for time to complete healing at 12 weeks showed a significantly higher non healing rate (P = 0.015) for the control group (53.9%) compared with the study group (30.4%). After adjusting for ulcer size at presentation, which was a statistically significant covariate (P = 0.0194), a statistically significant difference in non healing rate between groups was calculated (P = 0.0233), with odds of healing 2.0 times higher in the study versus control group. This study supports the use of single-application AM therapy as an effective treatment of diabetic, neuropathic ulcers.

Globalization, defined as the increasing flow of p eop le, information, goods, services, and other resources across national boundaries, is altering social contexts in ways that influence religious p ractices. Increasingly, religion is not only instantiated in local communities and national societies, but is also   

Drawing on ethnographic and interview data collected in El Salvador and South Africa over a four-year period, this article uses a social constructionist approach to describe two types of interaction between short-term mission teams and their hosts. First, hosts encounter the flow of teams as foreign social products. Once they internalize this new part of their social reality, hosts seek to recruit and control teams. They also mimic the practice of short-term missions, sending their own teams to remote locations. Second, hosts interact directly with visitors, engaging in world-building activities that create transnational religious ties. Short-term missions thus make residents of the new centers of Christianity more mobile in Christianity's global civil society and increase the number of ties between Christians across borders. These findings have implications for the scholarly debate about how to conceptualize Global Christianity; they also broaden the scope of the emerging discourse on short-term missions.

This article serves two purposes. First, it introduces the forum that follows in this issue on religion and development. Second, it serves as a review of the small but quickly growing literature on how religion interacts with efforts by (often religious) people and organizations to ameliorate poverty worldwide. We address the need to define both “religion” and “development” with clarity and precision. We also call for further research in this area by sociologists, particularly at a time when the landscape of development practice is shifting, from changes in funding sources and priorities to competition between religious and secular organizations.

How does religion help facilitate civic action in transnational contexts characterized by material inequality and spatial separation? Short‐term mission (STM) travel, a popular activity among U.S. religious groups, exemplifies a recently emerged form of transnational civic action characterized by face‐to‐face, decentralized, pragmatic activity. Our research analyzes how participants in STM‐based relationships manage inequality while pursuing an ideal of partnership across distance. We match data from a mixed methods study of Arizona congregations that produce STM travel with interview data from foreign religious organizations that host STM travelers in El Salvador. We engage gift exchange theory (GET) to show how a discursive repertoire combines with organized gift exchange practices to manage inequality and produce partnership in STM‐based relationships. Our data provide evidence of a unique cultural process, the spiritualization of reception, which emerges during gift reciprocation. This process converts unequal material gifts from foreign hosts into spiritual understanding among STM travelers, stabilizing status indebtedness that could threaten a partnership. This research increases knowledge of STM travel, shows how gift exchange structures can facilitate transnational religious partnerships, and suggests ways to use GET to understand transnational civic action in general.