Unwrapping the Comfort of Sameness With Spanish Immersion Elementary School

I watched my 6-year-old hover around the periphery of the table, unable to find somewhere to sit. The cafeteria was a cacophony of little voices, Spanish and English, tumbling over each other, her classmates sitting close and waiting to be dismissed to homeroom. I couldn’t help but notice how different Noelle looked from most of the children, with her liquid blond hair and saucerlike blue eyes. [excerpt

Jesus Lives, but Should He Live in My Front Yard?

As I drove home from church, I eyed the bright foam sign my 6-year-old daughter held. “Jesus is Alive” it read in kid scrawl. “We’re supposed to put them in our yards!” Noelle beamed, eyeing her creation proudly through pink-rimmed glasses. I imagined our wide, open yard in Pennsylvania, the green grass stretching without fences from one neighbor to the next. Our best friends in the neighborhood, secular humanists, would easily see it. I cringed. What would they think? [excerpt

Crew: Finding Community When Your Dreams Crash

Most young adults at some point experience a personal shipwreck —missing out on the job you wanted, the unexpected end of a relationship, a crisis of faith—that threatens to rip apart the fabric of your identity. What helps navigate a personal shipwreck is to have a crew of reliable people who walk with you through it. In Crew: Finding Community When Your Dreams Crash, Christin Taylor explores how young adults can both find good company during a time of personal shipwreck and be good company for others who might be experiencing their own shipwreck. In the process, you will learn the hope and security that comes from being part of a community. Based on sound scriptural principles and the latest research on young adult spiritual formation, Taylor gives young adults the knowledge and perspective you need to build a community that will help you make your way toward a sense of hope and new meaning. [From the publisher]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1059/thumbnail.jp

7 Things Churches Can Do to Make Queer People Feel Welcome

For as long as I can remember, the church, for me, has been a place characterized by shame and hurt. I remember Christian high school friends telling me that I would go to hell for being Queer. I remember hearing sermons from televangelists about the evils of homosexuality, and church leaders pressuring youth leaders to cast out their Queer members. I\u27ve heard more talk of love the sinner, hate the sin, and God didn\u27t make gay, than anyone should, and I\u27ve even received personalized hate mail declaring that God hates dykes. [excerpt

Shipwrecked in L.A.: Finding Meaning and Purpose When Your Dreams Crash

Most young adults encounter at least one shipwreck during their twenties. Everything you think you know about yourself, your life, your future, and even your faith suddenly breaks apart. You\u27re left scrambling to construct a lifeboat that will take you back to the shore. Christin Taylor knew how her life was going to turn out. She was going to be a missionary to the Hollywood film industry. But just eight weeks after moving to L.A., her hopes and dreams were shattered. The next four years found Christin circling around, into, and back out of the film industry, until she finally found her way home. As Christin shares a compelling story about her life and work in Burbank, Hollywood, and Beverly Hills, she interacts with the best research on young-adult formation and development, guiding young adults through this tumultuous time as they try to pick up the pieces and find hope for the future. [From the Publisher]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1015/thumbnail.jp

Spatial dispersion in two-dimensional plasmonic crystals: Large blueshifts promoted by diffraction anomalies

We develop a methodology to incorporate nonlocal optical response of the free electron gas due to quantum-interaction effects in metal components of periodic two-dimensional plasmonic crystals and study the impact of spatial dispersion on promising building blocks for photonic circuits. Within the framework of the hydrodynamic model, we observe significant changes with respect to the commonly employed local-response approximation, but also in comparison with homogeneous metal films where nonlocal effects have previously been considered. Notable are the emergence of a contribution from nonlocality at normal incidence and the surprisingly large structural parameters at which finite blueshifts are observable, which we attribute to diffraction that offers nonvanishing in-plane wave vector components and increases the penetration depth of longitudinal (nonlocal) modes.We acknowledge Sanshui Xiao for fruitful discussions. C. D. thanks the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) for financial support through a DFG research fellowship (No. 268910011) .J.C. acknowledges financial support from the Danish Council for Independent Research and a Sapere Aude Grant (FTP No. 12-134776). N.A.M. acknowledges support from the Danish Council for Independent Research (FNU No. 1323-00087). The Center for Nanostructured Graphene is sponsored by the Danish National Research Foundation, Project No. DNRF103

Social Influence and the Brain: Persuasion, Susceptibility to Influence and Retransmission

Social influence is an important topic of research, with a particularly long history in the social sciences. Recently, social influence has also become a topic of interest among neuroscientists. The aim of this review is to highlight current research that has examined neural systems associated with social influence, from the perspective of being influenced as well as influencing others, and highlight studies that link neural mechanisms with real-world behavior change beyond the laboratory. Although many of the studies reviewed focus on localizing brain regions implicated in influence within the lab, we argue that approaches that account for networks of brain regions and that integrate neural data with data beyond the laboratory are likely to be most fruitful in understanding influence

Determinants of Physical Activity and Screen Time Trajectories in 7th to 9th Grade Adolescents-A Longitudinal Study

Physical activity (PA) in youth tends to decline with increasing age, while sedentary behaviour including screen time (ST) increases. There are adolescents, however, whose PA and ST do not follow this pattern. The aim of this study is (i) to examine trajectories in PA and ST from grade 7-9 among students in Berlin, and (ii) to investigate the relationship of these trajectories with individual factors and school type. For the present analyses, changes in students' PA and ST across three time points from 7th to 9th grade were assessed via self-report questionnaires. Positive and negative trajectories were defined for both PA (positive: increasing or consistently high, negative: decreasing or consistently low) and ST (vice versa). Multivariable logistic regression analyses were performed to identify possible predictors of PA and ST trajectories. In total, 2122 students were included (50.2% girls, mean age 12.5 (standard deviation 0.7) years). Compared to grade 7, less students of grade 9 fulfilled PA and ST recommendations (PA: 9.4% vs. 13.2%; ST: 19.4% vs. 25.0%). The positive PA trajectory included 44% of all students (63% boys), while the positive ST trajectory included 21% of all students (30% boys). Being a boy was significantly associated with a positive PA trajectory, while being a girl, having a high socioeconomic status, and attending a high school, were significantly associated with a positive ST trajectory. Different PA and ST trajectories among adolescents should be taken into account when implementing prevention programs for this target group