Adult Children of Alcoholics: Ministers and the Ministries

Reviewed Book: Callahan, Rachel and Rea McDonnell. Adult Children of Alcoholics: Ministers and the Ministries. New York: Paulist Press, 199

Texts for preaching: a lectionary commentary based on the NRSV, year B

Reviewed Book: Brueggemann, Walter. Texts for preaching: a lectionary commentary based on the NRSV, year B. Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Pr, 1993

Two Kinds of Love: Martin Luther’s Religious World

Title: Two kinds of love : Martin Luther\u27s religious world Author: Tuomo Mannermaa; Kirsi Irmeli Stjerna Publisher: Minneapolis, Minn: Fortress Press, 2010. ISBN: 978080069707

Sin As Addiction

Reviewed Book: McCormick, Patrick. Sin As Addiction. New York: Paulist Press, 1989

Constrained Consensus

We present distributed algorithms that can be used by multiple agents to align their estimates with a particular value over a network with time-varying connectivity. Our framework is general in that this value can represent a consensus value among multiple agents or an optimal solution of an optimization problem, where the global objective function is a combination of local agent objective functions. Our main focus is on constrained problems where the estimate of each agent is restricted to lie in a different constraint set. To highlight the effects of constraints, we first consider a constrained consensus problem and present a distributed ``projected consensus algorithm'' in which agents combine their local averaging operation with projection on their individual constraint sets. This algorithm can be viewed as a version of an alternating projection method with weights that are varying over time and across agents. We establish convergence and convergence rate results for the projected consensus algorithm. We next study a constrained optimization problem for optimizing the sum of local objective functions of the agents subject to the intersection of their local constraint sets. We present a distributed ``projected subgradient algorithm'' which involves each agent performing a local averaging operation, taking a subgradient step to minimize its own objective function, and projecting on its constraint set. We show that, with an appropriately selected stepsize rule, the agent estimates generated by this algorithm converge to the same optimal solution for the cases when the weights are constant and equal, and when the weights are time-varying but all agents have the same constraint set.Comment: 35 pages. Included additional results, removed two subsections, added references, fixed typo

Liberation Theology and Its Critics: Toward an Assessment

Reviewed Book: McGovern, Arthur F. Liberation Theology and Its Critics: Toward an Assessment. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989

Consensus Propagation

We propose consensus propagation, an asynchronous distributed protocol for averaging numbers across a network. We establish convergence, characterize the convergence rate for regular graphs, and demonstrate that the protocol exhibits better scaling properties than pairwise averaging, an alternative that has received much recent attention. Consensus propagation can be viewed as a special case of belief propagation, and our results contribute to the belief propagation literature. In particular, beyond singly-connected graphs, there are very few classes of relevant problems for which belief propagation is known to converge.Comment: journal versio