Ministry and stress : listening to Anglican clergy in Wales

This study set out to examine the experiences of stress in ministry among a sample of Anglican clergy serving in Wales. Building on recent quantitative studies of work-related psychological health among Anglican clergy in England, the study employed mainly qualitative methods to illustrate eight issues: the clergy's overall assessment of their present health, their understanding of the characteristics of stress, their assessment of the levels of symptoms of stress within their own lives, their identification of the causes of stress within their experience of ministry, the people on whom they call for support in times of stress, their strategy for and styles of recreation, their assessment of the pastoral care provision available to clergy, and their views on enhancing initial clergy training to equip clergy to cope with stress. Data provided by 73 clergy (10 female and 63 male) portray a group of professionally engaged men and women who are well aware of the stress-related dynamics of their vocation, who are displaying classic signs of work-overload, and who are critical of and resistant to strategies that may confuse the pastoral care of stressed clergy with the accepted management role of the Church's hierarchy of bishops and archdeacons

Clergy work-related psychological health : listening to the Ministers of Word and Sacrament within the United Reformed Church in England

Drawing on the classic model of balanced affect proposed by Bradburn (The structure of psychological well-being, Aldine, Chicago, IL, 1969), this study conceptualised poor work-related psychological health in terms of high levels of negative affect in the absence of acceptable levels of positive affect. In order to illuminate self-perceptions of work-related psychological health among a well-defined group of clergy, a random sample of 58 ministers of word and sacrament serving within the west midlands synod of the United Reformed Church in England completed an open-ended questionnaire concerned with the following six guiding questions. Do you enjoy your work? How would you define stress? How would you define burnout? What stresses are there in your ministry? What do you do to keep healthy? What can the church do to enhance the work-related psychological health of ministers? Content analysis highlighted the main themes recurring through these open-ended responses. The conclusion is drawn that ministers of word and sacrament within the United Reformed Church in England are exposed to a number of recurrent recognisable sources of stress. Suggestions are advanced regarding the need for future more detailed research and for the development of more effective pastoral strategies

The relationship between recalled self-esteem as a child and current levels of professional burnout among Anglican clergy in England

This study links and tests three strands of theory concerned with explaining individual differences in levels of professional burnout in general and among religious professionals in particular. These three strands concern the significance of current self-esteem, recalled self-esteem as a child, and personality. Data were provided by a sample of 1,278 male stipendiary parochial clergy working in the Church of England who completed the modified Maslach Burnout Inventory (specially designed for use among clergy), and the short-form Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (designed to measure the personality dimensions of extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism), together with a semantic differential index of recalled self-esteem as a child. The bivariate correlation coefficients demonstrated significant associations between more positive self-esteem as a child and lower levels of professional burnout (higher personal accomplishment, lower emotional exhaustion and lower depersonalisation). The bivariate correlation coefficients also demonstrated significant associations between personality and professional burnout. Multiple regression analyses, however, demonstrated that the association between recalled self-esteem as a child and professional burnout largely disappeared after controlling for the personality variables. The conclusion is drawn that knowledge about the personality profile of clergy functions as a more secure predictor of susceptibility to professional burnout than knowledge about recalled self-esteem as a child

Mechanisms and implications of changes in the timing of ocean freeze-up

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2018The shift to an Arctic seasonal sea ice cover in recent years motivates a deeper understanding of freeze-up processes and implications of a lengthened open water season. As the sea ice boundary between the Arctic ocean and atmosphere covers a smaller area, the effects of enhanced wind mixing become more pronounced. Winds are important for ocean circulation and heat exchange. Ultimately, they can influence when freeze-up can occur, or can break up new ice as it forms. The chapters of this thesis are motivated by the substantial social and geophysical consequences of a lengthening open water season and linked through discussion of what controls freeze-up timing. Implications of a declining sea ice cover as it pertains to the three Arctic Alaska coastal communities of Kotzebue, Shishmaref, and Utqiaġvik are explored in depth. Indices of locally-relevant metrics are developed by using physical climate-related thresholds found by other studies to impact Alaska communities and coastal erosion rates. This allows for a large-scale climate dataset to be used to define a timeseries of these indices for each community. We found a marked increase in the number of false freeze-ups and break-ups, the number of days too windy to hunt via subsistence boat, and in Utqiaġvik, an approximate tripling of erosion-capable wind events from 1979-2014. The WRF-downscaled ERA-Interim dataset (ERA-Interim for sea ice) was also used in the analysis of all chapters. The cumulative wind energy input into the upper ocean was calculated for the Chukchi, southern Beaufort, and northeast Bering Seas at time periods up to three months prior to freeze-up, and then correlated with the timing of freeze-up. We have found that increased wind energy input into the upper ocean 2-3 months prior to freeze-up is positively and most strongly correlated with the date of freeze-up in the Chukchi Sea. Analysis of wind climatology shows winds are increasing in the period prior to freeze-up as a delayed freeze-up moves into the fall storm season. A negative correlation is found in the Bering Sea over shorter timescales, suggesting that storms promote the arrival of sea ice there. Case studies are evaluated for the Chukchi Sea and Bering Sea, to illustrate mechanisms at play that cause the positive and negative correlations in these seas, respectively. Ice advection and high winds from northerly directions are shown to hasten the timing of freeze-up in the Bering Sea. In the Chukchi Sea, higher winds from the dominant northeasterly direction promote upwelling of warm and salty water up onto the shelf, which suggests a mechanism for why high winds are associated with a delayed freeze-up there. We next examine the effect of winds on freeze-up timing by using a 1-D vertical column model of the mixed layer. The model is initialized using temperature and salinity profiles obtained from a freeze-up buoy deployed in 2015 in the north-east part of the Chukchi Sea. The meteorological forcing used to drive the model experiments comes from a WRF-downscaled ERA-Interim Reanalysis dataset. Our results show that vertical wind-driven mixing leads to enhanced heat loss. In light of the previously found positive correlation between wind energy input and freeze-up timing, the mixing model results suggest horizontal advection not captured by the 1-D column model can dominate wind-driven vertical mixing to promote freeze-up.ArcSEES NSF award 1263853, Center for Global Chang

Reading the back page : listening to clergy serving in the presbyterian church (USA) reflecting on professional burnout

This volume includes a wide range of papers that explore individual and institutional aspects of religion from a social-science perspective. The special section has articles from research groups in Europe, the USA and Australia on clergy work-related psychological health, stress, burnout and coping strategies. The general papers include studies on coping strategies among Buddhists, gender differences in response to church decline, teenage participation in religion, social capital among Friends of Cathedrals, psychological profiles of clergy, education effects on Roman Catholic deacons, and an analysis of prayer requests. Together these papers form a valuable collection indicating the depth and vibrancy of research in these field

Amplified Arctic warming by phytoplankton under greenhouse warming

Phytoplankton have attracted increasing attention in climate science due to their impacts on climate systems. A new generation of climate models can now provide estimates of future climate change, considering the biological feedbacks through the development of the coupled physical-ecosystem model. Here we present the geophysical impact of phytoplankton, which is often overlooked in future climate projections. A suite of future warming experiments using a fully coupled ocean-atmosphere model that interacts with a marine ecosystem model reveals that the future phytoplankton change influenced by greenhouse warming can amplify Arctic surface warming considerably. The warming-induced sea ice melting and the corresponding increase in shortwave radiation penetrating into the ocean both result in a longer phytoplankton growing season in the Arctic. In turn, the increase in Arctic phytoplankton warms the ocean surface layer through direct biological heating, triggering additional positive feedbacks in the Arctic, and consequently intensifying the Arctic warming further. Our results establish the presence of marine phytoplankton as an important potential driver of the future Arctic climate changes.open111414Ysciescopu

Spacetime as a quantum circuit

We propose that finite cutoff regions of holographic spacetimes represent quantum circuits that map between boundary states at different times and Wilsonian cutoffs, and that the complexity of those quantum circuits is given by the gravitational action. The optimal circuit minimizes the gravitational action. This is a generalization of both the “complexity equals volume” conjecture to unoptimized circuits, and path integral optimization to finite cutoffs. Using tools from holographic TT¯ , we find that surfaces of constant scalar curvature play a special role in optimizing quantum circuits. We also find an interesting connection of our proposal to kinematic space, and discuss possible circuit representations and gate counting interpretations of the gravitational action