Experience and Faith: The Significance of Luther for Understanding Today\u27s Experiential Religion

Reviewed Book: Hordern, William Edward. Experience and Faith: The Significance of Luther for Understanding Today\u27s Experiential Religion. [S.l.]: Augsburg Publishing House, 1983

Counseling and Confession: The Role of Confession and Absolution in Pastoral Counseling

Reviewed Book: Koehler, Walter J. Counseling and Confession: The Role of Confession and Absolution in Pastoral Counseling. [S.l.]: Concordia, 1982

Generalized Slow Roll for Non-Canonical Kinetic Terms

We show that the generalized slow-roll approach for calculating the power spectrum where the inflationary slow roll parameters are neither small nor slowly varying can be readily extended to models with non-canonical kinetic terms in the inflaton action. For example, rapid sound speed variations can arise in DBI models with features in the warp factor leading to features in the power spectrum. Nonetheless there remains a single source function for deviations that is simply related to the power spectrum. Empirical constraints on this source function can be readily interpreted in the context of features in the inflaton potential or sound speed.Comment: 4 pages, minor changes reflect PRD accepted versio

Stereochemistry of Polypeptide Conformation in Coarse Grained Analysis

The conformations available to polypeptides are determined by the interatomic forces acting on the peptide units, whereby backbone torsion angles are restricted as described by the Ramachandran plot. Although typical proteins are composed predominantly from {\alpha}-helices and {\beta}-sheets, they nevertheless adopt diverse tertiary structure, each folded as dictated by its unique amino-acid sequence. Despite such uniqueness, however, the functioning of many proteins involves changes between quite different conformations. The study of large-scale conformational changes, particularly in large systems, is facilitated by a coarse-grained representation such as provided by virtually bonded C{\alpha} atoms. We have developed a virtual atom molecular mechanics (VAMM) force field to describe conformational dynamics in proteins and a VAMM-based algorithm for computing conformational transition pathways. Here we describe the stereochemical analysis of proteins in this coarse-grained representation, comparing the relevant plots in coarse-grained conformational space to the corresponding Ramachandran plots, having contoured each at levels determined statistically from residues in a large database. The distributions shown for an all-{\alpha} protein, two all-{\beta} proteins and one {\alpha}+{\beta} protein serve to relate the coarse-grained distributions to the familiar Ramachandran plot.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, Postprint of book chapter submitted to the Biomolecular Forms and Functions, M. Bansal and N. Srinivasan, Eds. copyright (2013) [copyright World Scientific Publishing Company