The Liminal Church: Why Navigating Thresholds Between Us Leads to Thriving

Through the discovery, design, and delivery stages of the doctoral project, I centered my work on the following NPO: Churches can thrive when they understand, navigate, and leverage the liminality existing between people, the community, and where God is leading. Despite the myriad of different contexts among local churches, whether polity, worship style, belief statements, and geographical locality, congregations are still composed of people living in relationship to one another and the community around them. Relationships, no matter their nature, are complicated. For the relationships within a local church to thrive, they require intentionality, coaching, effort, openness, and vulnerability. My vocational calling drives my research and project to serve Christ’s church. For over two decades, I have served as a local church pastor, congregational consultant/coach, and denominational leader within the Cooperative Baptist tradition. I cultivated an interactive book to address my NPO. The book is The Liminal Church: Why Navigating the Thresholds Between Us Leads to Thriving. The book examines social and cognitive science through a theological lens to enhance the church’s capacity for thriving. The book\u27s goal is not to provide an anthological background of each topic but a starting place for healthy dialogue and exploration of how to navigate these challenges together as a local church. The book currently consists of seven completed chapters, with a strategic plan to write ten more. There are four main facets of each chapter: (1) Primary learning content; (2) Chapter recap; (3) Personal introspection; (4) Group design exercise. The remaining ten chapters will examine the role of differentiation, the psychology of fear and othering, the challenges that arise with personality types within a church, the social science of political tribalism, various communication and conflict management styles, understanding intergenerational gaps, the power of presence, and the essential ingredient of fun within a congregation

Between Time and Eternity: Reimagining Spiritual Complexity through Musical Meaning and the Cinematic Human Figure

In a time defined as both an age of abundant atheism which triumphs in the wake of the death of God, and an age of post-secularism which returns to religion, the discrete forms of music and cinema remain germane sites for theorising the relation between belief and the nature of existence. Taking up the particular relation between the cinematic human figure and musical meaning, how might Marcel Cobussen’s musical-spiritual concept of the threshold problematise the difference between Christian and atheistic belief, so as to reimagine the boundaries of spiritual identity, faith, truth, ethics, choice and possibility? As an original contribution to knowledge, this thesis engages a series of liminal aesthetic modes—the ineffable, the uncanny, utopian desire and absurd feeling—to bring spiritual theories of music and film philosophy into a dynamic dialogue with one another, not only to develop a circuit of reciprocity between the two disciplines that affirms the significance of one to the other, but to work toward a more complex understanding of the spiritual significance of the cinematic human figure and musical meaning than discrete theories of cinema, music or film music have traditionally accommodated alone. Drawing from a range of continental thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Edgar Morin, Gilles Deleuze and Marcel Cobussen, this thesis argues that liminal modes of musical meaning and the cinematic human figure inhabit a dynamic, indeterminate space between a belief in eternity and a belief in time, becoming conduits and catalysts for a mode of possibility I call spiritual complexity. Spiritual complexity affirms the paradox, ambiguity and irony of liminal modes of existence in our post-religious and post-secular time, where the ontological and ethical possibilities of human identity may be reimagined in the thresholds of archaic, Platonic, Christian and atheistic belief

Introductory Computer Forensics

INTERPOL (International Police) built cybercrime programs to keep up with emerging cyber threats, and aims to coordinate and assist international operations for ?ghting crimes involving computers. Although signi?cant international efforts are being made in dealing with cybercrime and cyber-terrorism, ?nding effective, cooperative, and collaborative ways to deal with complicated cases that span multiple jurisdictions has proven dif?cult in practic