Good for body and soul
Churches’ Building a Healthy Temple program offers health educations to members of the congregations
When she was growing up, Summer Wilmoth wanted to cure cancer. In her mind, that meant going to medical school. After losing her mother to cancer as an 8-year-old, “I just always had it in my head, I'm going to be a doctor,” Wilmoth said. “I was always like, ‘I’m going to find a cure for cancer and save everyone.’”
But “research sucked me in” as an undergraduate student at the University of Texas at San Antonio, she said, and now Wilmoth wants to prevent people from getting sick in the first place.
She found an outlet for that with a consortium of churches that formed the Building a Healthy Temple program, which offers health education to its congregations. Wilmoth started working with it as a graduate student in 2010.
After earning a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from UTSA, she also became the school’s first student to be accepted to a joint Ph.D. program in translational science between UTSA, the University of Texas at Austin, UT Health San Antonio and UT Health Houston School of Public Health.
Translational science works to move scientific discoveries to their actual application more efficiently, to overcome barriers that prevent such research from quickly benefiting people and patients.
It’s about “beginning with the end in mind,” Wilmoth said: thinking about the implementation and policy outcomes when the research first begins.
“You have to start your basic discovery with, ‘How can I design this to help people in the future?’” she said. “It’s not just doing science for the sake of science.”
The same idea underlies the 35 San Antonio congregations that incorporate Bible study, nutrition lessons and physical activity in things like Healthy Vacation Bible School and cancer and obesity prevention curriculums.
The lessons use religion to teach about the body as “the temple of the Holy Spirit,” said Central Church of God lead pastor José Daniel Montañez, the program’s spiritual adviser. “And about the importance of being good stewards not only of the things we receive but also of our spirit, body and soul.”
It was launched by Dr. Meizi He, a UTSA professor of kinesiology, health, and nutrition, and Deborah Parra-Medina, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UT Health Science Center.
Montañez has helped develop the lessons, applying relevant Scripture and preparing sample sermons for participating churches.
Bible Study lessons such as “Eat
said he was aware of that controversy, but this was strictly a financial decision.
“The federal government needs to step up and handle their problems and we need to handle our local problems,” he said.
For decades, the county has held the inmates at the Central Texas Detention Facility on Laredo Street, but the building was included in a parcel of land the county recently gave to the University of Texas at San Antonio to build a new campus downtown.
At times, the county made as much as $5 million a year in the arvice rangement, Wolff said, but that has decreased to about $1 million in recent years. The county was paid on a per-inmate basis, and that rate changed over time along with costs.
“A terrible thing to talk about — profit — when you’re dealing with human beings, but yes, we were,” Wolff said.
The county initially planned to let GEO Group refurbish a portion of the Bexar County Jail’s annex to house the inmates, but Sheriff Javier Salazar said that would force him to relocate some county inmates. That would cost the county about $10 million annually, more than any revenue it was making from the arrangement.
Bozeman said the Marshals SerWolff is aware of the decision and will work to find new holding locations for the inmates. He said it is too early to provide a timeline of when that could happen.
The GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment.
Wolff said the county could legally give 30 days’ notice to Pamerleau that it will stop holding the inmates, but he wants to work on a more seamless transition.
In another twist, Pamerleau, the former Bexar County sheriff who lost her re-election bid to Salazar, wrote to commissioners Tuesday to say the federal government could not pay the county as regularly scheduled because of the federal government shutdown.