Materiality, Beauty, and Space: The Eastern Traditions as a Ressourcement for Pentecostal Worship and the Arts

Excerpt: Pentecostals have reason to feel some affinity with the more Eastern traditions.... Since liturgical worship is a central and highly developed aspect of Orthodox Church life and practice, this paper will focus specifically on the elements of materiality, beauty, and space in the tradition and worship life of the Eastern churches. To begin with, using the writings of Maximus the Confessor (d.662), a compendium of the early Eastern tradition and a foundational bridge into the full development of Byzantine theology, I will briefly sketch out some cosmological and soteriological accents which provide a context for the church’s views on materiality, beauty, and space. I will then move on to trace the refinement of these perspectives and enfranchisement into the dogmatic tradition. After a sampling of resulting Orthodox vision and practice with respect to our three foci, I will suggest some possible ways the witness of the Eastern churches might serve as a confirming and enriching resource for the further development of Pentecostal worship and the arts in the Spirit

Maximus the Confessor and a Deeper Actualization of the Apostolic Dimensions of Pentecostal Movements

Excerpt: ...I propose to explore one expression of this more ancient and eastern tradition, as found in the cosmic vision of Maximus the Confessor. After a brief sketch of his life and times and his relationship to the larger orthodox tradition I will attempt to lay out some of the chief features of both his theological and cosmological framework and his ascetic way of practice in community. I will conclude by suggesting that both this framework and way of practice can indeed help resource healing of humankind’s relationship with one another and the other realms of the creation and that an appropriation of aspects of this stream of the Christian tradition in the coming decades can help global Pentecostal movements influence societies toward greater social and ecological health

Unequal Britain: How Real Are Regional Disparities?

Average earnings vary widely across the regions of Britain, a fact that has prompted many decades of policies aimed at reducing regional disparities. But as Henry Overman and Steve Gibbons demonstrate, such variation reveals little, especially if we ignore regional differences in the cost of living and availability of local amenities.wage, disparities, labour,Britain, spatial equilibrium, amenity value, housing market

Evaluating the effects of planning policies on the retail sector: or do town centre first policies deliver the goods

Acknowledgements This paper represents work in progress and is still a preliminary draft. We would like to acknowledge the funding provided to SERC by ESRC, DCLG, BIS and the Welsh Assembly. We have benefited greatly from discussions with many colleagues and professional contacts: we would particularly like to mentio

From St. Petersburg to Krushchev\u27s Boot

Program for the first annual RISD Cabaret held in Memorial Hall. Design and layout by Justin Kerr.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/liberalarts_cabaret_programs/1000/thumbnail.jp

The Future of Rural Policy: Lessons from Spatial Economics

This policy paper is concerned with rural policy. It spells out the lessons for rural policy that emerge from recent SERC research.

Mostly Pointless Spatial Econometrics?

We argue that identification problems bedevil most applied spatial research. Spatial econometrics solves these problems by deriving estimators assuming that functional forms are known and by using model comparison techniques to let the data choose between competing specifications. We argue that in most situations of interest this, at best, achieves only very weak identification. Worse, in most cases, such an approach will simply be uninformative about the economic processes at work rendering much applied spatial econometric research 'pointless', unless the main aim is simply description of the data. We advocate an alternative approach based on the 'experimental paradigm' which puts issues of identification and causality at centre stage.statistical methods, spatial, modeling

The Future of Rural Policy: Lessons from Spatial Economics (Policy Note)

This policy note spells out lessons for rural policy that emerge from recent SERC research. It summarises a SERC policy paper available at http://www.spatialeconomics.ac.uk/textonly/SERC/publications/download/sercpp008.pdf

Wage Disparities in Britain: People or Place?

This paper investigates wage disparities across sub-national labour markets in Britain using a newly available microdata set. The findings show that wage disparity across areas is very persistent over time. While area effects play a role in this wage disparity, most of it is due to individual characteristics (sorting). Area effects contribute a very small percentage to the overall variation of wages and so are not very important for understanding overall levels of wage disparity. Specifically, in our preferred specification area effects explain less than 1% of overall wage variation. This share has remained roughly constant over the period 1998- 2008.wage, disparities, labour