“No amount of alcohol is safe.” So read the August 23, 2018 headlines following the publication in the journal Lancet of a global study. Though in the weeks after the Lancet’s publication it became plain that the authors' conclusions were overstated to bait the media, it was hard to ignore its troubling epidemiological evidence. So, in this apparent paradigm shift, what happened to the French Paradox?
In Wine & Health, the first wide-ranging analysis of the existing science on the topic, author Dr. Richard Baxter argues that the answer emerges as a set of new paradoxes: We see that studies may be globally accurate while at the same time miss wine’s position in health and well-being; we note that wine drinkers outlive nondrinkers on average, even as we are warned about alcohol’s dangers; we observe that wine drinkers maintain mental sharpness in old age better than teetotalers; and we find evidence of wine’s benefits in the very studies telling us that alcohol is a risk to public health.
So where does all of this leave wine? On the dinner table, as part of a moderate, healthy adult diet. Dr. Baxter explains in objective terms what every wine lover needs to know: When it is a daily drink with meals and part of a healthy lifestyle, wine’s association with longevity and healthspan endures, as it has done since the dawn of civilization.
He wrote 168 or so separate works -- such treatises as the Christian Directory, the Methodus Theologiae Christianae, and the Catholic Theology, might each have represented the life's work of an ordinary man. His Breviate of the Life of Mrs Margaret Baxter records the virtues of his wife, and reveals Baxter's tenderness of nature. Without doubt, however, his most famous and enduring contribution to Christian literature was a devotional work published in 1658 under the title Call to the Unconverted to Turn and Live. This slim volume was credited with the conversion of thousands and formed one of the core extra-biblical texts of evangelicalism until at least the middle of the nineteenth century.
Richard Baxter was ordained into the Church of England, 1638, but in two years allied with Puritans opposed to the episcopacy of his church. At Kidderminster (1641-60) he made the church a model parish. The church was enlarged to hold the crowds. Pastoral counseling was as important as preaching, and his program for his parish was a pattern for many other ministers. Baxter played an ameliorative role during the English Civil Wars.
He was a chaplain in the parliamentary army but then helped to restore the king (1660). After the establishment of the monarchy, he fought for toleration of moderate dissent in the Church of England. Persecuted for more than 20 years and was imprisoned (1685) for 18 months, the Revolution of 1688, replacing James II with William and Mary, brought about an Act of Toleration that freed Baxter to express his opinions.
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