Your One Wild and Precious Life: Women on the Road of Ministry

The title of this lecture is taken from a poem entitled “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver. For most of the poem she meanders through open fields on that gorgeous day, observing details of grasses, bugs, and birds. At the end she muses: Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn\u27t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? The poet here poses the question of vocation. You have only one life, and it is a treasure. It is also finite: some day you will die. How will you spend your hours and your energies? What will you do “with your one wild and precious life?” I chose this title to highlight the astonishing fact that in our day women in remarkable numbers are answering this question by choosing to engage in ministry. Let us be clear that women have always been ministering in the church, in unofficial and undervalued, though irreplaceable, ways. Think of the millions of women named “anonymous” through the centuries who have handed on the faith and enacted God’s love in the world. The better-known story of the ministries of women’s religious orders is another magnificent case in point. But now a surging wave of lay women are becoming educated with theological and pastoral skills in order to take initiatives and serve in ministerial positions. The women students and alumnae of the Graduate Program in Pastoral Ministry here at Santa Clara are a good case in point; your ranks are swelled around this country and around the world. What makes this phenomenon so striking is that it is a free choice. No woman has to do this; our culture applies no social pressure on a woman to become active in ministry; women today have multiple career options, and this surely is a path that will make no one rich! What is behind this? It is a matter of vocation. You may know the lovely line by Frederick Buechner: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Women with deep gladness are responding to a call from the Holy Spirit of God, heard deep in their hearts, to take the giftedness of their “one wild and precious life” and meet the world’s deep hunger for meaning and healing, liberation and redemption. I hasten to add that laymen, too, are responding to this call and giving their lives in service to the world through pastoral ministry, and not one of these dedicated lives should be overlooked. But given the history of women’s subordination in the church and exclusion from many ministries, a situation that continues even as we speak, the phenomenon of growing numbers of women in pastoral ministry deserves a special look. There are now more qualified women in ministry than ever before in the history of the church. Something new is afoot. In this lecture I invite you to consider this subject in three points [the proverbial 3] roughly organized in terms of past, present, and future. First, we will place this development in an historical framework. Second, we will move .to the spiritual heart of the matter, the vocational call to ministry rooted in women’s baptism. And third, in view of the conflicts and ambiguities that continue to plague much of women’s experience in the field, we will draw encouragement from the dangerous memory of biblical women to accompany us into the future

Designing optimal mixtures using generalized disjunctive programming: Hull relaxations

A general modeling framework for mixture design problems, which integrates Generalized Disjunctive Programming (GDP) into the Computer-Aided Mixture/blend Design (CAMbD) framework, was recently proposed (S. Jonuzaj, P.T. Akula, P.-M. Kleniati, C.S. Adjiman, 2016. AIChE Journal 62, 1616–1633). In this paper we derive Hull Relaxations (HR) of GDP mixture design problems as an alternative to the big-M (BM) approach presented in this earlier work. We show that in restricted mixture design problems, where the number of components is fixed and their identities and compositions are optimized, BM and HR formulations are identical. For general mixture design problems, where the optimal number of mixture components is also determined, a generic approach is employed to enable the derivation and solution of the HR formulation for problems involving functions that are not defined at zero (e.g., logarithms). The design methodology is applied successfully to two solvent design case studies: the maximization of the solubility of a drug and the separation of acetic acid from water in a liquid-liquid extraction process. Promising solvent mixtures are identified in both case studies. The HR and BM approaches are found to be effective for the formulation and solution of mixture design problems, especially via the general design problem

An interval-matrix branch-and-bound algorithm for bounding eigenvalues

We present and explore the behaviour of a branch-and-bound algorithm for calculating valid bounds on the k-th largest eigenvalue of a symmetric interval matrix. Branching on the interval elements of the matrix takes place in conjunction with the application of Rohn’s method (an interval extension of Weyl’s theorem) in order to obtain valid outer bounds on the eigenvalues. Inner bounds are obtained with the use of two local search methods. The algorithm has the theoretical property that it provides bounds to any arbitrary precision > 0 (assuming infinite precision arithmetic) within finite time. In contrast with existing methods, bounds for each individual eigenvalue can be obtained even if its range overlaps with the ranges of other eigenvalues. Performance analysis is carried out through nine examples. In the first example, a comparison of the efficiency of the two local search methods is reported using 4,000 randomly generated matrices. The eigenvalue bounding algorithm is then applied to five randomly generated matrices with overlapping eigenvalue ranges. Valid and sharp bounds are indeed identified given a sufficient number of iterations. Furthermore, most of the range reduction takes place in the first few steps of the algorithm so that significant benefits can be derived without full convergence. Finally, in the last three examples, the potential of the algorithm for use in algorithms to identify index-1 saddle points of nonlinear functions is demonstrated

Night-sky brightness monitoring in Hong Kong A city-wide light pollution assessment

Results of the first comprehensive light pollution survey in Hong Kong are presented. The night-sky brightness was measured and monitored around the city using a portable light-sensing device called the Sky QualityMeter over a 15-month period beginning in March 2008. A total of 1,957 data sets were taken at 199 distinct locations, including urban and rural sites covering all 18 Administrative Districts of Hong Kong. The survey shows that the environmental light pollution problem in Hong Kong is severe - the urban night skies (sky brightness at 15.0 mag arcsec -2) are on average ~ 100 times brighter than at the darkest rural sites (20.1 mag arcsec -2), indicating that the high lighting densities in the densely populated residential and commercial areas lead to light pollution. In the worst polluted urban location studied, the night-sky at 13.2 mag arcsec -2 can be over 500 times brighter than the darkest sites in Hong Kong. The observed night-sky brightness is found to be affected by human factors such as land utilization and population density of the observation sites, together with meteorological and/or environmental factors. Moreover, earlier night skies (at 9:30 p.m. local time) are generally brighter than later time (at 11:30 p.m.), which can be attributed to some public and commercial lightings being turned off later at night. On the other hand, no concrete relationship between the observed sky brightness and air pollutant concentrations could be established with the limited survey sampling. Results from this survey will serve as an important database for the public to assess whether new rules and regulations are necessary to control the use of outdoor lightings in Hong Kong. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011.published_or_final_versionSpringer Open Choice, 21 Feb 201

Some Observations on the Oral and Manual Methods of Teaching the Deaf with a Plea for Oralism

The purpose of this paper is not to prove or disprove a theory or theories. The reason for the decision against such a purpose is that for over a century educators of the deaf as well as the deaf themselves have discussed and tried to prove which method of teaching seems to be the best. Likewise, in the many articles which have been written on this subject there is found no definite answer to this problem. So who is there who can say that he has found the answer. The problem confronting all those interested in this problem is that for every person who says something positive about oral education of the deaf there is another person who says something negative or completely contradictory about it. And so the discussion of which methodology is best continues on

Science for Young Deaf Children

This paper hopes to turn the attention of teachers of the deaf towards science education. Most schools of the deaf have some sort of science program if they hope to integrate their deaf children into hearing schools. The present paper proposes a developmental approach to science, stressing the preschool or kindergarten years. The main objective is an emphasis on basic concept-formation in the early years. It is hoped that with this conceptual background the deaf child will have fewer problems with language comprehension as he enters the science program in the first grade. At least he would be facing two problems, concept-formation and language comprehension, separatelv instead of simultaneously

Anything of Which a Woman is Capable: A History of the Sisters of St. Joseph in the United States; Volume 1, The Foundations

The title, Anything of Which a Woman is Capable, comes from Father Jean Pierre Médaille, the Jesuit who brought together the first Sisters of St. Joseph in the mid-seventeenth century. Since 1650, congregations of St. Joseph have grown in Europe, the Americas, India and the Orient, all attracting women who are called to do anything of which they are capable to serve their dear neighbor. This volume tells stories of the foundations of congregations in France and then, beginning in 1836, in the United States. It introduces the reader to intrepid women whose willingness to serve knew no boundaries and whose strong personalities provided an ample match for Church leaders who either encouraged or tried to control their zeal. The copious footnotes make this a valuable addition to the history of Catholic women religious in the United States as well as to the history of Catholicismhttps://griffinshare.fontbonne.edu/uasc-books/1009/thumbnail.jp

Arbitrarily tight aBB underestimators of general non-linear functions over sub-optimal domains

In this paper we explore the construction of arbitrarily tight αBB relaxations of C2 general non-linear non-convex functions. We illustrate the theoretical challenges of building such relaxations by deriving conditions under which it is possible for an αBB underestimator to provide exact bounds. We subsequently propose a methodology to build αBB underestimators which may be arbitrarily tight (i.e., the maximum separation distance between the original function and its underestimator is arbitrarily close to 0) in some domains that do not include the global solution (defined in the text as “sub-optimal”), assuming exact eigenvalue calculations are possible. This is achieved using a transformation of the original function into a μ-subenergy function and the derivation of αBB underestimators for the new function. We prove that this transformation results in a number of desirable bounding properties in certain domains. These theoretical results are validated in computational test cases where approximations of the tightest possible μ-subenergy underestimators, derived using sampling, are compared to similarly derived approximations of the tightest possible classical αBB underestimators. Our tests show that μ-subenergy underestimators produce much tighter bounds, and succeed in fathoming nodes which are impossible to fathom using classical αBB