The Church of the Nazarene and Church Growth: Better Together?

The essence of the article is to offer a fresh look at Church Growth to the Church of the Nazarene. Perhaps the Church of the Nazarene is one of many denominations that struggle with plateaued and declining churches. It seems to this writer that we have failed to ask difficult questions about what we are doing and why we do those things. If we are part of the Body of Christ, then we ought to be flourishing. Instead the converse is often more true. The Church Growth movement may have brought out some people hoping to sell their latest and greatest program that would “guarantee” growth in the local church. However, the very core of the movement is to raise disciples who disciple others. An honest assessment at where we are today could be extremely vital to the future of denominations like the Church of the Nazarene

Revision needed? A social constructionist perspective on measurement scales for assessing gender role stereotypes in entrepreneurship

This article compares contemporary views of who and what constitutes entrepreneurship with dimensions captured in established scales for determining gender role stereotypes associated with entrepreneurship. In so doing, we respond to ongoing debates about the timeliness, contextualisation and predetermination of scales, such as Schein’s Descriptive Index (SDI), Bem’s Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) and the Personal Attribute Questionnaire (PAQ). Our empirical study consists of 422 descriptions of an entrepreneurial ideal provided by a sample of young adults, which we analysed using quantitative content analysis. The comparison between participants’ perceptions and the items captured in the gender role stereotype scales shows only a partial overlap. Although masculine qualities are mentioned, we find various androgynous (e.g., passion, team player, willingness to learn) qualities of entrepreneurs not covered in SDI, BSRI or PAQ. Based upon this, we can derive several recommendations on how established scales can be revised through future research

History, folklore, and myth in the Book of Judges

The book of Judges professes to be a history of early Israel. This article unpacks how is Judges doing history-writing, which will implicate how historiography was done in the Ancient Near East more broadly as well as who is doing the history-writing in the book of Judges. To illustrate, we will look at a section of Judges where the historiographical efforts of Judges are at work. Herodotus and Thucydides did not invent history writing, but they invented what Peter Machinist calls the “Analytical I,” a historian who “distance[s] themselves from certain things and persons around them, about which they are going to speak.” Before them, such detachment is absent. Egyptian historians, for example, use the past to speak about the present. “The past is mobilized in…a wide range of contexts and directions.” Thus, in the 18th-Dynasty “Neferhotep Stele,” history legitimizes a contemporary situation. They attribute causality in history to the gods, as in the 9th century “Annals of Osorkon.” Foreigners only appear when their impact on events was decisive. Cycles of dissolution and restoration are post factum but not remote. From the New Kingdom on, historians divided the past into distinct periods. Overall, historiography is stylized but not divorced from reality.peer-reviewe

Thermal performance: the politics of environmental management in architecture

How do architects address the ambiguity of practice, being on the one hand tasked with making buildings that perform well in terms of energy use and environmental strategy, and on the other facilitating the production of capital, through their service to ensuring that the performance of the occupants (efficiency, productivity and wellbeing) is satisfied? In this PhD by practice, I use the theoretical concept of ‘the performative’ through both the written thesis and project to interrogate the various ways in which thermal management becomes entangled with management processes. The context is specific: the workplace at a moment of convergence between smart technology with architecture; where notionally, agency is given over to autonomous environmental systems to do the right thing, and work environments that are embedded in performative-linguistic company cultures that urge their occupants to ‘do the right thing’. In other words – where machines do things with fans and boilers, and humans do things with emails, meetings, performance reviews and corporate culture. I invoke Lucy Schuman’s question ‘who is doing what to whom?’ to draw attention to the way that actions are elicited from employees through discursive and constitute organisational practices. At a point where new-build non-domestic buildings, which are specifically designed to perform environmentally well, are failing to do so- I invoke Isabelle Stengers’ ethical proposition ‘what are we busy doing?’ to ask whether architects’ actions are fundamentally compromised by this entanglement. I propose a strategy for architects to address their practice in relation to these propositions, and trace the actions as they migrate through discursive fields – sustainability, organisational management, theories of motivation, workplace politics, technological innovation, activism and resistance. The narrative of the written thesis is asynchronous, and is interconnected with the project in multiple ways, it is structured in such a way so as to introduce strategies of encountering the various discursive fields which form the context of study. The project work, on the other hand, immerses the reader directly within these fields. The database that reveals the multiple realms that embed the concepts of power, economics, desire, love, productivity and war into the architectural concerns for comfort and energy use; while the performance video places two subjects constituted by management, whose passions are put to work and situate them within a discursive environment latent with the full cultural significance of its metaphors in the workplace of the knowledge economy. The first part of the written component of the thesis opens up discussions about performance and action – which are generally applicable for the discourse of environmental performance, as mediated by the occupant and the use of technology, within the contemporary workplace. I move into the second part of the written thesis, which places the context specifically within the conceptual domain of thermal management, elaborates on the implications of taking a performance oriented approach to ‘heat’, and reveals how performance and the domain of heat converge on issues of productivity, subjectivity, and wellbeing. The two actors who perform in the video can only continuously improve their performance, every action can be subverted or appropriated, presenting the urgency for my conclusion in the written thesis, that as we, in architecture, are expected to also act entrepreneurially – the question is not how we do so subversively, or as a mode of critique. We should instead pay attention to Stengers’ and Suchman’s questions, and paying attention to what is brought about, and for whom, and focus our work on care for precarious, exhausted and hyper-active subjectivities that are produced through these actions

\u27Terroristic Threats\u27 and COVID-19: A Guide for the Perplexed

The first few months of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States saw the rise of a troubling sort of behavior: people would cough or spit on people or otherwise threaten to spread the COVID-19 virus, resulting in panic and sometimes thousands of dollars’ worth of damages to businesses. Those who have been caught doing this — or have filmed themselves doing it — have been charged under so-called “terroristic threat” statutes. But what is a terroristic threat, and is it an appropriate charge in these cases? Surprisingly little has been written about these statutes given their long history and regular use by states. Our article is one of the first to look systematically at these statutes, and we do so in light of the rash of these charges during the recent pandemic.Our argument begins with the premise that these statutes typically contemplate a “core case” of terroristic threatening, e.g., someone calls in a bomb threat which forces the evacuation of a building. But these statutes have been variously revised and repurposed over the years, most notably to mass shootings, and more problematically to those who threaten to give others HIV. The recent COVID-19 charges seem to involve facts that are outside the “core case,” so that even if terroristic threatening is a permissible charge in these cases, it is often not the most appropriate one. We conclude by suggesting that in many of the COVID-19 cases other charges should be made (criminal mischief, disorderly conduct, false reporting, etc.) instead of terroristic threatening, and that a lot of the expressive and deterrence benefits of more serious charges can be accomplished just as well by social disapproval

Conditions for building a community of practice in an advanced physics laboratory

In this paper we explore the theory of communities of practice in the context of a physics college course and in particular the classroom environment of an advanced laboratory. We introduce the idea of elements of a classroom community being able to provide students with the opportunity to have an accelerated trajectory towards being a more central participant of the community of practice of physicists. This opportunity is a result of structural features of the course and a primary instructional choice which result in the development of a learning community with several elements that encourage students to engage in more authentic practices of a physicist. A jump in accountable disciplinary knowledge is also explored as a motivation for enculturation into the community of practice of physicists. In the advanced laboratory what students are being assessed on as counting as physics is significantly different and so they need to assimilate in order to succeed.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figur

Go home? the politics of immigration controversies

"The 2013 Go Home vans marked a turning point in government-sponsored communication designed to demonstrate control and toughness on immigration. In this study, the authors explore the effects of this toughness: on policy, public debate, pro-migrant and anti-racist activism, and on the everyday lives of people in Britain. Bringing together an authorial team of eight respected social researchers, alongside the voices of community organisations, policy makers, migrants and citizens, and with an afterword by journalist Kiri Kankhwende, this is an important intervention in one of the most heated social issues of our time.

The Commons of the Tragedy

Presents findings from surveys conducted in September and October 2001. Looks at how the Internet was used by millions after the September 11 terror attacks to grieve, console, share news, and debate the nation's response