Union with Christ in the Writings of Ellen G. White

Building on the work of nineteenth-century theologian Augustus Strong, five historical approaches to union with Christ identified by Bruce Demarest in the late twentieth century include: an ontological union, a sacramental union, a covenantal union, a moral or filial union and an experiential union. Given the identification of multiple approaches to union with Christ, my dissertation attempts to clarify Ellen G. White’s concept of union with Christ using Demarest’s categories as an evaluation tool. I traced the development of her writings on union with Christ from 1860 to 1898 to ask whether White’s approach is best described as an ontological, sacramental, covenantal, moral or filial or experiential union. While elements of some of the approaches Demarest identified are evident in White’s writings, such as the need for believers to experience Christ for themselves, no one category fits White’s approach exclusively. White’s approach can best be described using her own language. Union with Christ is a spiritual, vital, heart, mystical, indissoluble, moral union that connects repentant sinners to Christ and other believers. Her key metaphors used to describe the nature of this relationship are the vine and the branches, the mystic ladder and the golden chain. The vine and the branches explain how believers are intimately connected to Christ, receiving moral and spiritual power through the Holy Spirit who makes Christ present within. The mystic ladder illustrates Christ’s incarnation that makes union with Him possible. White also used the mystic ladder to describe the progressive nature of sanctification, ascending the ladder by faith and perseverance. The golden chain illustrates the love of the Father poured into the hearts of believers. For White, Christ metaphorically is the true vine, the mystic ladder and the golden chain. Believers partake of the divine nature and by exercising faith in Christ, become one with God. In my conclusion, I answered the following additional questions in relation to White’s writings: What is union with Christ? What is the nature of union with Christ? How is it formed? How is it maintained? What are its consequences? In brief, union with Christ is a believer’s free will, spiritual relationship with Christ. It is formed by repentance and faith and is maintained by living, active faith. Engaging in spiritual disciplines, may strengthen a believer’s union with Christ through prayer and Scripture reading, the daily surrender of the will, engaging with others and faith in Christ. Its consequences are multiple resulting in a transformed life and character. They include justification, sanctification, obedience and participation in the mission of Christ to redeem humanity. Christ’s goal is to reunite the inhabitants of heaven and earth by an indissoluble tie through a vital, spiritual relationship with Himself and the Godhead

The Ambiguities of the Holy: Authenticating Relics in Seventeenth-Century Spain

Recent scholarship has shown that, even at the heart of the Catholic world, defining holiness in the Counter-Reformation was remarkably difficult, in spite of ongoing Roman reforms meant to centralize and standardize the authentication of saints and relics. If the standards for evaluating sanctity were complex and contested in Rome, they were even less clear to regional actors, such as the Bishop of Jaén, who supervised the discovery of relics in Arjona, a southern Spanish town, beginning in 1628. The new relics presented the bishop, Cardinal Baltasar de Moscoso y Sandoval, with knotty historical, theological, and procedural dilemmas. As such, the Arjona case offers a particularly vivid example of the ambiguities that continued to complicate the assessment of holiness in the early modern period. As the Bishop of Jaén found, the authentication of relics came to involve deeper questions about the nature of theological and historical truth that were unresolved in Counter-Reformation theory and practice

Wave Equation for Sound in Fluids with Vorticity

We use Clebsch potentials and an action principle to derive a closed system of gauge invariant equations for sound superposed on a general background flow. Our system reduces to the Unruh (1981) and Pierce (1990) wave equations when the flow is irrotational, or slowly varying. We illustrate our formalism by applying it to waves propagating in a uniformly rotating fluid where the sound modes hybridize with inertial waves.Comment: RevTeX, 27page

Improving Our Reference Data, or How We Killed the Hash Mark

All responsible academic libraries record their reference transactions. It is good practice to know how many patrons have been helped at your service points. For years we have participated in this record keeping with hash marks on paper, painstaking tallying, and manual spreadsheet entry for the purpose of saying, “we helped X patrons during Y month”. But, like most things academic, reference runs on its own calendar and requires more sophisticated tools to truly investigate and evaluate. To generate more useful reference statistics, we created a simple, online tool for recording reference interactions. The tool is accessible anywhere reference is taking place, generating normalized data in a centralized, backed up database. This design allows for more nuanced and granular analysis, in addition to streamlining the reporting process at a later date. Development of the tool has been iterative, soliciting feedback from primary users, including graduate students and librarians. A key part of this process was our decision to build a tool as opposed to purchasing a pre-made one. Our need to better understand our reference staffing needs was key, and a variety of commercial tools tout this ability. However, the barriers to developing such a tool in-house have dramatically lowered, making the creation of web-based tools more common. Similarly, the tool itself uses existing library infrastructure, as it is a simple web form and hooks into an existing database, so infrastructure changes were nil. With a custom-built tool, we have total control over its functionality and reporting. This presentation will discuss the full development and implementation of the new reference statistics tool, along with the data we have collected and the trends we have observed from the first six months of its use

Crossroads for Success: University Mission, Community Partnerships and Information Literacy

Urban-based higher educational institutions often embrace an outreach mission that not only “gives back” to the community supporting the university but also fosters a relationship that may lead to recruiting local talent. This presentation examines what happens when that community engagement mission intersects with the library, and traditional and non-traditional partnerships are formed, offering information literacy a role in the goal of helping high school and middle school students prepare to succeed in college

Bush animal attacks: management of complex injuries in a resource-limited setting

Though animal-related injuries and fatalities have been documented throughout the world, the variety of attacks by wild animals native to rural East Africa are less commonly described. Given the proximity of our northwestern Tanzania hospital to Lake Victoria, Lake Tanganyika, and the Serengeti National Park, and presentation of several patients attacked by bush animals and suffering a variety of complex injuries, we sought to report the pattern of attacks and surgical management in a resource-limited setting. Four patients who were admitted to the northwestern Tanzania tertiary referral hospital, Bugando Medical Centre (BMC), in 2010-2011 suffered attacks by different bush animals: hyena, elephant, crocodile, and vervet monkey. These patients were triaged as trauma patients in the Casualty Ward, then admitted for inpatient monitoring and treatment. Their outcomes were followed to discharge. The age and gender of the patients attacked was variable, though all but the pediatric patient were participating in food gathering or guarding activities in rural locations at the time of the attacks. All patients required surgical management of their injuries, which included debridement and closure of wounds, chest tube insertion, amputation, and external fixation of an extremity fracture. All patients survived and were discharged home. Though human injuries secondary to encounters with undomesticated animals such as cows, moose, and camel are reported, they often are indirect traumas resulting from road traffic collisions. Snake attacks are well documented and common. However, this series of unique bush animal attacks describes the initial and surgical management of human injuries in the resource-limited setting of the developing world. Animal attacks are common throughout the world, but their pattern may vary in Africa throughout jungle and bush environmental settings. It is important to understand the management of these attacks in resource-limited health care environment. Further, the growing population and human encroachment on previously wild habitats such as the northwestern Tanzania bush argues for increased community awareness to assist in prevention of human injuries by animals

High Sensitivity DNA Detection Using Gold Nanoparticle Functionalised Polyaniline Nanofibres

Polyaniline (PANI) nanofibres (PANI-NF) have been modified with chemically grown gold nanoparticles to give a nanocomposite material (PANI-NF–AuNP) and deposited on gold electrodes. Single stranded capture DNA was then bound to the gold nanoparticles and the underlying gold electrode and allowed to hybridise with a complementary target strand that is uniquely associated with the pathogen, Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), that causes mastitis. Significantly, cyclic voltammetry demonstrates that deposition of the gold nanoparticles increases the area available for DNA immobilisation by a factor of approximately 4. EPR reveals that the addition of the Au nanoparticles efficiently decreases the interactions between adjacent PANI chains and/or motional broadening. Finally, a second horseradish peroxidase (HRP) labelled DNA strand hybridises with the target allowing the concentration of the target DNA to be detected by monitoring the reduction of a hydroquinone mediator in solution. The sensors have a wide dynamic range, excellent ability to discriminate DNA mismatches and a high sensitivity. Semi-log plots of the pathogen DNA concentration vs. faradaic current were linear from 150 × 10−12 to 1 × 10−6 mol L−1 and pM concentrations could be detected without the need for molecular, e.g., PCR or NASBA, amplification