RECOVERING THE GIFT OF DISCERNING OF SPIRITS: HISTORY, HERMENEUTIC, AND PRACTICAL TOOL FOR MINISTRY

Abstract Churches and ministries need to identify and recruit effective leaders. Employing the gift of discerning of spirits can help ministries identify quality leaders and avoid problems and pitfalls. This project aims to equip Pastors and Church Leaders to rediscover and utilize discerning of spirits in their leadership selection process. The significance of this project is that although there has been much written about spiritual gifts, little has been written specifically about the Discerning of Spirits and its application to leadership recruitment and development in modern ministry. It offers church and ministry leaders another avenue to recover and utilize the gift of Discerning of Spirits to better serve their ministry contexts. This project argues that there is a historical, Biblical/Theological and pragmatic rationale for employing the gift of Discerning of Spirits as a tool for Pastors and Ministry Leaders to identify committed and effective ministry leaders. A historical analysis of Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen and Ignatius of Loyola reveal their encounters with and uses of discerning of spirits that leaders can use today. Each experienced the charism in different and unique ways and provided original and useful insights into the gift. A hermeneutical study of 1 Cor. 12:10 reveals that in discernment of spirits the main action, the discerning, is accomplished by the Holy Spirit who then shares that information with the gifted person. It was found that the gift is not specifically connected prophecy and false prophecy, nor is it intended as the instrument for testing the spirits in 1 John 4:1. The definition of discerning of spirits was provided with a discussion of how charismatic gifts work in general. With regard to how gifts are obtained, the principle of Ask-Seek-Knock with a scriptural analysis was offered as well the idea that the Spirit gives gifts to whom He wills. The method of how the charismata work and ways God communicates is expounded with a special emphasis on the physical body as an instrument of discernment. Finally discerning of spirits is presented as a practical tool for ministry, choosing leaders, the necessity of a ministry team in the process, and as a means to identify and avoid problems

Matching Contributions and the Voluntary Provision of a Pure Public Good: Experimental Evidence

Laboratory experiments are used to study the voluntary provision of a pure public good in the presence of an anonymous external donor. The external funds are used in two different settings, lump-sum matching and one-to-one matching, to examine how allocations to the public good are affected. The experimental results reveal that allocations to the public good under lumpsum matching are significantly higher, and have significantly lower within-group dispersion, relative to one-to-one matching and a baseline setting without external matching funds.public goods, free riding, laboratory experiments

Maine, Indian Land Speculation, and the Essex County Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692

Although the well-known Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 took place in Massachusetts, it was clearly related to events in Maine and elsewhere on the New England frontier. In recent years scholars have increasingly pointed to the many participants in the trials who had ties to Maine. These connections go beyond the accused witches and afflicted girls who were war refugees in Massachusetts, to include many residents of the Bay Colony caught up in a wave of speculation in frontier Indian lands during the 1680\u27s. Most of the witchcraft judges and their families owned such land in Maine. Staunch Puritans such as Cotton Mather saw this speculation as another sign of the declining religious fervor that was making New England increasingly vulnerable to attack from Satan. The fact that this speculation involved “heathen” Native Americans and perceived radical or even Godless Englishmen living on the frontier, made the threat all the more severe. Emerson W. Baker is an associate professor of history at Salem State College and James Kences is an independent scholar. Both authors live in York, Maine and are currently at work on other projects related to witchcraft. Kences is tracing the politics of the factions in Salem Village with contemporary political events in England. Baker is writing a book on witchcraft in the 1680s, titled Lithobolia: The Stone-Throwing Devil of New England

Paying for Energy Peaks: Learning from Texas\u27 February 2021 Power Crisis

From February 14–19, 2021, winter storm Uri blanketed Texas with extreme cold. Tragically, the severe temperatures overwhelmed the state’s power system. Texas’ power grid ended up more than 20 Gigawatts short of the electricity Texans needed 2 – more power than all of California produces on an average day. Over two-hundred lives were lost3 and an estimated $295 billion in damage resulted.4 Yet many had long regarded Texas’ electric power system, and its regulation, as a model for others. What happened? That question is the focus of this article. This article first provides an overview of the severe power outages in February 2021 and the regulation of Texas’ electric power system, explaining why Texas is on the forefront of challenges that will grow more prominent as the world transitions to cleaner energy. Next, it discusses competing electric power business models and their regulation, including why many had long viewed Texas as a model of wise electricity regulation, and why the problems revealed by winter storm Uri will only grow more pressing for not just Texas but the entire world as it transitions to more reliance on electricity and a power grid supported by natural gas and renewables. It concludes by discussing Texas’ path forward and the broader lessons of this crisis for business lawyers and others. The tremendous economic losses of this episode attest to the importance of business lawyers having a basic understanding of their clients’ energy dependencies, the risks that significant power problems could present to their businesses, and the ability to advise them as they seek to mitigate such vulnerabilitie

Discrimination of prostate cancer cells and non-malignant cells using secondary ion mass spectrometry

This communication utilises Time-of-Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (ToF-SIMS) combined with multivariate analysis to obtain spectra from the surfaces of three closely related cell lines allowing their discrimination based upon mass spectral ions

Endowments and new institutions for long-term observations

Author Posting. © Oceanography Society, 2007. This article is posted here by permission of Oceanography Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Oceanography 20, 4 (2007): 10-14.An ever-increasing volume of publications on the changing ocean environment underscores the requirement for long-term observations to understand and predict ocean and climate change. Such observations must be globally distributed and carried out over long time periods. But a means of obtaining those observations—particularly in the ocean—is not in place today. There is no global system of routinely funded, long-term, high-quality measurements to provide the necessary understanding of climate in general and the ocean in particular. The scientific literature is full of examples of tantalizing short records that do not illuminate the physical problems. Long-term biological measurements are in an even more limited state of development. With society demanding better forecasts, and the need to quantify the human role in climate change, it is more important than ever that we find ways to establish the necessary institutional basis for and achieve the proper levels of funding for long-term measurements

Drafting Local Ordinances for Natural Resource Protection

Drafting, passing, and enforcing a successful ordinance can be a very difficult and complicated task.The purpose of this manual is to familiarize lay people interested in environmental protection with the tools necessary to draft and pass local ordinances that address their particular needs. A well-crafted ordinance can be a key tool in protecting the environment at the local level, and organizations and citizens can play a crucial role in drafting such laws

Binary black hole merger dynamics and waveforms

We study dynamics and radiation generation in the last few orbits and merger of a binary black hole system, applying recently developed techniques for simulations of moving black holes. Our analysis of the gravitational radiation waveforms and dynamical black hole trajectories produces a consistent picture for a set of simulations with black holes beginning on circular-orbit trajectories at a variety of initial separations. We find profound agreement at the level of one percent among the simulations for the last orbit, merger and ringdown. We are confident that this part of our waveform result accurately represents the predictions from Einstein's General Relativity for the final burst of gravitational radiation resulting from the merger of an astrophysical system of equal-mass non-spinning black holes. The simulations result in a final black hole with spin parameter a/m=0.69. We also find good agreement at a level of roughly 10 percent for the radiation generated in the preceding few orbits.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figures, submitted to PRD, update citations, minor change

Understanding the potential of phosphorus transport to water resources via leaching

Improved management of phosphorus (P) from both manure and fertilizer sources is important because of surface water quality concerns. This study considers possible P loss via leaching through the soil and examines the dynamics of the adsorption/extraction process

Aortic Embolism in Cats: Prevalence, Surgical Treatment and Electrocardiography

Aortic embolism (caudal arterial thromboembolism) was diagnosed over a four-year-period in 14 out of 2,000 cats in a hospital clinic population (7/1,000). Including 35 cases reported in the literature, the average age of 50 cats with aortic embolism was 6-8 years (range one to 16 years). Of these, 37 were males and 13 were females. Endocarditis with thrombosis was the most frequently observed cause of aortic embolism, although aortic arteriosclerosis was reported in one cat. The clinical and pathological features of aortic embolism in five cats are described in this report. In electrocardiograms of four of these, arrhythmias or conduction disturbances were recorded. Intact emboli in the aorta and external iliac arteries were removed by abdominal aortic embolectomy in two cats within hours after the onset of posterior paralysis. Death resulted in one case from cardiac complications and in the other by euthanasia at the later date because of probably recurrent aortic embolism. In the other three cases, multiple sections of the aorta with the embolus in situ were examined, but no microscopic changes in the aortic wall were noted. Surgical removal of an aortic embolus is technically and economically feasible and is considered the treatment of choice when treatment is requested within hours after the onset of clinical signs. Although embolectomy can yield a good immediate result; the long range justification for such therapy requires further evaluation, since recurrent embolization may develop