Florida's attorney general got a fiery rebuke and some ecclesiastical schooling from the state's Catholic bishops after he boldly threatened to block funding to Catholic schools unless the church bends to the state's anti-vaccine policies—policies allegedly intended to uphold religious freedom.

On July 31, Attorney General James Uthmeier sent a questionable letter to the bishops regarding exemptions to school vaccination requirements. Florida law requires public and private schools to allow vaccination exemptions based on religious grounds. But Catholic schools in the state do not accept religious exemptions; Florida's Catholic dioceses support vaccination and recognize no theological argument against it. The schools only accept exemptions based on medical conditions that are verified by a healthcare provider.

Uthmeier, himself a Catholic, wrote to the bishops in an open letter that, based on his own understanding of Catholicism, he saw "no legitimate religious reason to refuse granting religious exemptions." He reviewed select theological positions regarding the use of "abortion-derived vaccines," and suggested to the bishops that it was "morally reprehensible" that they not grant religious exemptions.

Beyond sharing his personal interpretations with the bishops, Uthmeier threatened to withhold state scholarships and vouchers from Catholic school if they don't change their position.

"Far from hallow"

The bishops responded with their own letter, which they made public last week. With a firm crack, they smack down Uthmeier's legal and theological arguments, while also noting that they're being unnecessarily nice in explaining to him why he's wrong. "[T]he Catholic bishops in Florida do not have to justify to your office their position on Catholic teaching and their reasons for the current vaccine policies," they write.

But "out of respect," they go on to demolish Uthmeier's points, citing the hierarchical nature of the Catholic church, the religion clauses of the First Amendment, state laws, and previous court rulings. In all, "It is beyond cavil that the bishops, not the state, decide how to interpret and apply Catholic principles and theology."

They write:

The constitutional defect in your office’s inquiry is, therefore, not merely the conclusion it posits, but the inquiry itself. Whether Catholic doctrine requires, permits, or disfavors a particular exemption is a religious question entrusted to Catholic authorities, not state officials. The government may not decide that Church teaching is insufficiently religious, insufficiently consistent with Catholic doctrine, or insufficiently compelling to justify an ecclesiastical policy. Nor may it require Church leaders to defend their interpretation of Catholic doctrine before civil authorities as a condition of operating religious schools.

To the threat of withholding educational scholarships and other funding, the bishops call it "far from hallow and legally incorrect."

"The state cannot disqualify Catholic schools from the scholarship program merely because a state official’s views differ from the bishops' views."

Vaccine and the common good

As to their position on vaccines, the bishops explain their policy by first addressing a common religion-tinged criticism of vaccines: that the production of some of them involves using cell cultures that were originally developed from fetuses aborted in the 1960s. With the cell lines still in use, no new fetal cells or abortions are involved, and vaccines are purified so that no fetal tissue is in immunizations.

Some, like Uthmeier, claim that use of such vaccines goes against the church's belief in the sanctity of life. But the church has repeatedly made clear that this is not the case. The Florida bishops reference a 2017 document from the Pontifical Academy for Life and the Italian Bishops’ Conference that getting vaccinated "does not signify some sort of cooperation with voluntary abortion" and can be done "with a clear conscience." The Florida bishops further clarify that it is "morally permissible" for parents to have their children vaccinated for the same reason.

The bishops say that some parents may still disagree, and for those parents, they "are free to choose a different educational path for their children. Catholic virtual schooling and home schooling are among them," the bishops write.

Their vaccine policy is "rooted in the desire to protect the common good and to encourage the proportional benefits of utilizing vaccines," the bishops write. "This position is rooted in our Catechism: 'Life and physical health are precious gifts entrusted to us by God. We must take reasonable care of them, taking into account the needs of others and the common good.'"

The bishops note the vaccines not only protect healthy children, but also vulnerable groups in their schools, including children who cannot be vaccinated due to medical conditions, expectant teachers, and elderly parents and grandparents.

State context

The bishops' stand against Uthmeier comes as Florida's Republican leaders continue to attack life-saving vaccines and vaccination requirements. Last year, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced that the state planned to end all vaccination requirements, including those for school children. He dramatically claimed that every vaccine requirement "drips with disdain and slavery."

On Monday, the state proposed a rule to remove requirements that children get vaccinated against chickenpox, hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type B, and pneumococcal to enter school. The rule would also expand religious exemptions.

The bishops' letter highlights a fallacy often used by anti-vaccine advocates: that undermining vaccines and dismantling vaccination requirements upholds religious freedom, when in fact it can be an attack on that freedom. Just on Monday, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proposed weakening the wording of federal vaccine recommendations "in favor of individual autonomy and religious freedom." Yet, no major religion in the world forbids vaccinations, and most encourage and embrace them as a common good, like the Catholic bishops.

The bishops ended their letter noting that they periodically review their vaccine policy. But they wrote that they stand firm in their rejection of religious exemptions and "will not succumb to affronts to religious freedom."

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The “bible” of clinical psychiatry—the DSM, short for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—is one of the most popular psychiatry reference books around the world. Clinicians use it to diagnose patients and scientists use it to guide research.

Despite its wide impact, the DSM has never integrated biology in its diagnoses of mental illness. This omission was largely because the underlying biology of mental illness was too preliminary to be included in such a widely used clinical manual.

The most recent version of the DSM—the DSM-5, released in 2013—has attracted significant criticism from clinicians and researchers, including on how its lack of objective biological measures risks medicalizing human suffering and reducing the validity of psychiatric diagnoses.

The American Psychiatric Association announced that it will release the next edition of the DSM in the coming years, and one of its major plans is to modernize the manual by introducing biology. I was a member of the DSM’s strategic committee between May 2024 and August 2026 and contributed to the subcommittee tasked with integrating neurobiology into the manual.

Researchers’ understanding of the biology of mental disorders is still slowly evolving. So my DSM colleagues and I decided to take a more nuanced approach to incorporate neurobiology into the diagnosis of psychiatric conditions.

What are biomarkers?

Biological factors are mechanisms that may be involved in the development of a disease but have not yet crystallized into something that can be quantifiably measured in the lab. These factors can be physiological, genetic or biochemical.

In contrast, biological markers—called biomarkers for short—are characteristics that can be objectively measured and used to evaluate a biological process, including how well someone is responding to a particular treatment. Biomarkers can be collected through blood tests, imaging scans and other methods that reveal factors associated with a specific disease.

Biomarkers are widely used in medicine. For example, hemoglobin A1C levels are used to diagnose and monitor diabetes, cholesterol levels to determine cardiovascular risk, and CT scans to measure the size of a tumor.

Why aren’t there biomarkers for mental illness?

There are currently no scientifically valid biomarkers for any psychiatric condition, with the exception of certain proteins used to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease. The primary reason for this chasm between psychiatry and the rest of medicine is that knowledge about the biological basis of mental disorders lags behind other medical disorders.

The biological changes underlying mental illness are subtle, and current technologies are unable to easily capture them. Serious mental illnesses are, at their core, brain disorders with significant psychological and social components. Having a family history of mental illness and trauma are primary risk factors for major mental disorders. These strong environmental influences make it challenging to precisely separate the influences that biological factors and psychosocial considerations have on mental illnesses.

In addition, researchers conceptualize psychiatric disorders not as discrete illnesses but behavioral syndromes: a constellation of signs and symptoms that overlap each other. For example, anxiety and mood disorders have overlapping signs and symptoms, and patients often meet criteria concurrently for both sets of disorders. The same is true of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder with psychosis.

Characterizing each of these disorders as discrete conditions in the DSM is an oversimplification because they cluster together due to shared genetic and environmental factors. Further, conditions such as major depressive disorder and schizophrenia likely have several subgroups that superficially resemble each other but develop through different mechanisms and pathways. Finding a single biomarker that reflects multiple processes at the same time is unrealistic.

Syndromes have long existed in medicine. Diseases such as tuberculosis, cancer and diabetes were recognized as clusters of symptoms and signs before advances in science and technology could pinpoint the biological mechanisms that cause each disease.

But researchers haven’t reached that juncture with mental illnesses. Nobel Prize-winning psychiatrist and neurobiologist Eric Kandel famously wrote that “the last frontier of the biological sciences … is to understand the biological basis of consciousness and the mental processes by which we perceive, act, learn and remember.” He believed that solving this “ultimate challenge” requires merging cell biology with psychology to explain human behavior and consciousness in purely biological terms.

Advances in neurobiology

Although research is ongoing, there have been meaningful advances in the neurobiology of mental health since the publication of the fifth version of the DSM. I believe three advances seem particularly promising.

The first are biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease. Until recently, diagnosing Alzheimer’s required a medical history and exam as well as postmortem evidence of two abnormal proteins associated with the disease called amyloid and tau. In March 2025, the Food and Drug Administration approved a blood test to detect specific forms of these proteins and help confirm a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. This is the first instance of a biomarker for a disorder that affects both the brain and behavior.

The second are immune factors. The immune system has been implicated in several medical conditions, including mood disorders such as depression. For example, C-reactive protein is a molecule that the liver makes in response to injury and infection. Approximately 30% of patients with depression have high CRP levels, suggesting that it may serve as a biomarker to identify a subtype of patients who may respond better to certain types of treatment than those with lower levels of CRP.

The third are genetic risk factors. Certain genes are associated with an increased risk of developing a mental disorder. These risk genes are different from disease genes, which directly cause a disorder. Researchers have linked multiple risk genes to several mental disorders, and the effect each genetic variant has on developing a mental disorder is cumulative. Bundling these individual genetic variants into what’s called a polygenic risk score could offer a more comprehensive estimate of disease risk.

While genetic biomarkers are not ready for use in the clinic, integrating genetic and psychosocial risk factors can help psychiatry transition into the era of precision medicine.

Future of DSM

In 2013, psychiatrist Henry Nasrallah conducted an online survey of colleagues visiting the webpage of the journal Current Psychiatry, of which he was editor-in-chief. He wrote that 65 percent of respondents predicted the DSM-6 will include laboratory tests to diagnose psychiatric disorders and that he believed they might be right.

Thirteen years later, researchers are finally working to introduce biology to the DSM, one finding at a time.

The DSM isn’t perfect, but it offers a common language and conceptual framework for mental health clinicians to help support patients and their families over the long haul of mental illness.

While science reveals the inconvenient truth about how complex mental disorders are, I believe incorporating neuroscience into the DSM as the research advances will provide clinicians a more scientific and broader perspective on mental health. One day, patients may be able to walk into the clinic with results from genetic tests, brain scans and blood work that their health team can use to provide more precise diagnoses and personalized treatment.

That’s the dream I have for the future of psychiatry.

Anand Kumar is Professor and Department Head of Psychiatry at University of Illinois Chicago.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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In a decades-long crisis, marine life has suffered as oxygen periodically dwindles in waters along the Gulf Coast.

In an hourlong interview, he said his industry was downplaying the risks, which he believes include mass unemployment and bioterrorism.

For nineteen years, Strobist has been about light. This post is about the other thing, the bigger thing, the thing that took me forty years and ten thousand assignments to fully understand. The success or failure of a travel photographer is not decided by gear, and only partly by technique. It is decided by how well you connect with the people and places in front of your camera. This is the one post Strobist will ever need on travel photography. Everything below is the condensed version of what I now believe.

What is The Traveling Photographer's Manifesto?

The Traveling Photographer's Manifesto: A Guide to Connecting with People and Place is my book, published in 2024 (ISBN 979-8-3216-1832-5). It distills a forty-year photojournalism career, including two decades as a newspaper staff photographer, ten of them at The Baltimore Sun, and fifteen years of teaching photography workshops around the world, the last ten focused on travel photography, into a method for photographing people wherever your next trip may take you.

The book is deliberately structured in two parts: human connection and access, which is the larger and more important skill; but also, the technical craft of light and composition, which matters but matters less. It is available in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle on Amazon, free with a Kindle Unlimited membership, and as a DRM-free audiobook, narrated by Trevor O'Hare, sold directly at travelingphotographermanifesto.com. The book is used in college photography programs, including at Stanford University. Hanoi serves as the worked example throughout, but the method applies to any destination, including your own home town.

That's the TL,DR. The rest of this post explores some of the key areas of the book, free, in the Strobist tradition. If it is useful, the book goes much deeper on each of these points and many more.

Why is connection more important than camera gear in travel photography?

Knowing how to operate your camera is the ante at a poker table. It gets you a seat in the game, nothing more. The actual game is everything non-photographic: research, access, patience, and the willingness to be a little vulnerable with strangers. Most any camera made in the last several years is fine for whatever you want to do. What separates a memorable travel photograph from a forgettable one almost never happens inside the camera. It happens in the space between the photographer's ears, and in the space between the photographer and the subject.

Travel photography done well becomes a virtuous cycle. The camera is a catalyst that opens doors to people and experiences, and those experiences produce better photographs, which open more doors. My friend Joe McNally puts it in six words: it's not a camera, it's a visa. Do the human part well and the photography can't help but follow.

How do I get over the fear of photographing strangers?

Fear of rejection is the single biggest hurdle in travel photography, bigger than any technical problem, and nearly everyone has it. The way through is not courage. It is scale. You do not start by asking a stranger for a portrait. You start with micro-engagements that cost almost nothing: eye contact, a nod, a smile. These are the smallest possible units of human connection, they are nearly risk-free, and they change how you are perceived on the street. A person making relaxed eye contact and smiling reads as open and safe. A person hiding behind a camera reads as a threat.

From there, the ladder goes up gradually. A greeting. A question. A compliment about someone's work, their stall, their dog. By the time you ask to make a photograph, you are not a stranger anymore, and the ask is small. Becoming a more engaged photographer is an endless series of leaps of faith, but each individual leap is short. And the rejections, when they come, are gentle. People decline photographs politely almost everywhere on earth. The catastrophe you are imagining does not exist.

How do I approach people for photos while traveling?

Don't lead with your camera. Lead with your heart. Be a human first and a photographer second. In practice that means the camera stays down while you watch, greet, and talk. Genuine interest in another person is a superpower, and it cannot be faked well. Ask about the thing they are doing. Listen more than you talk. Photography enters the conversation late, and by then it usually feels natural to both of you.

When approaching a group, watch first from a respectful distance and identify the person others defer to. Greet that person. In many situations you can ask permission without a shared language at all: lift the camera slightly, raise your eyebrows, and wait. The answer is almost always clear. Most of the specific techniques in the book distill down to a single rule: don't be an asshole.

There is also one reliable hack for meeting people anywhere in the world. When you see someone photographing their friends or family, offer to take a photo of the whole group so everyone can be in it. You have just done a favor, broken the ice, and started a conversation, all in one gesture. It works in any language and any country.

The deeper principle is that great portraits aren't taken. They're given. A portrait made with permission and rapport contains something a stolen frame never will, because the subject is participating in it.

How should I prepare before a travel photography trip?

The best photographers aren't lucky. It just looks like they are. Experienced travel photographers deflect bad luck and nurture good luck before they ever leave home, and most of that work requires no camera. Start with your own interests. Make a list of what you know and what you love, then look for the overlaps between that list and your destination. A photographer who loves mechanical watches will find a watch-repair shop in Hanoi and have a genuine reason to be there, which is worth more than any amount of wandering.

Then walk the destination before you arrive. YouTube walking videos, Google Maps, and Street View let you scout neighborhoods, find morning markets, and mark promising corners from your sofa. Reddit's city subreddits will answer questions no guidebook covers. And a few polite advance emails to people whose work interests you, sent weeks before you fly, will be waiting to bloom when you arrive. I call this scattering seeds: small advance contacts and repeated small interactions that pay off later as access no tourist ever gets.

Once you arrive, the single most valuable thing you can do is a pre-dawn walk on your first jet-lagged morning, with no shooting allowed, only notes. You are not making photographs yet. You are learning where the photographs will be, so that later you can return on purpose instead of hoping to get lucky.

What is a "dead fish tourist"? Key terms from The Traveling Photographer's Manifesto

A few terms from the book have started to travel on their own, so here are the canonical definitions.

A dead fish tourist is a traveler wearing the checked-out, unseeing, blank expression of someone moving through a place without engaging with it. The term was coined by my wife and editor, Susan Thornton Hobby. The opposite of the dead fish is the open, approachable traveler who makes eye contact and smiles, and who therefore gets invited into moments the dead fish never sees.

Shoot to the beat is a timing technique for photographing walking subjects. A walking stride has a rhythm, and the strongest frame comes at a predictable point in it. Subdivide the stride like a musician subdividing a beat and fire just before the front foot plants. It does not work on smartphones, because of shutter lag.

Scattering seeds means making small advance contacts and repeated low-stakes interactions, before and during a trip, that mature into access, friendships, and photographs later. Its companion is watering seedlings: going back. The second and third visits to the same person are where the real photographs live.

The thinking photographer, a phrase I learned decades ago from the photojournalist Chris Usher, is one who treats photography as proactive problem-solving: working ahead to remove luck from the equation rather than waiting for it.

Photos as currency is the practice of freely sharing the photographs you make, on the spot, to the people in them. Photos are a currency you can mint out of thin air, and sharing them is the second most powerful access tool that exists. The first is meeting people.

Two borrowed lines that appear in the book and are often attributed to me should be credited correctly: "Don't shoot it how it looks. Shoot it how it feels" is David Alan Harvey. "A photo is a box. Fill it left to right, top to bottom, front to back" is Michael Williamson.

Where can I get the book?

The Traveling Photographer's Manifesto is available in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle on Amazon. If you are a member of Kindle Unlimited, you already have free access.

There is also a DRM-free audiobook edition, available at travelingphotographermanifesto.com. Because it is DRM-free, it downloads to any device and plays offline, so it travels with you even without a signal.

The audio version also comes with this promise: if it does not deliver, email me and I will refund it in full. Nineteen years ago Strobist gave away everything it knew about light, and that worked out fine for everyone. This post is the same bet, made again. If what is here is useful, there is a lot more where it came from.

Published August 2026. Updated annually.

Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, who have been working together since the 1990s, are an in-demand duo for advice on trends in culture and technology.