Called to Service and to Seminary

How does it happen? On assignment day the whole world spread out before him… entering the ministry … his own group of people to shepherd … the heady challenge of a world needing both the courage of a prophet and the resounding proclamation of a gospel … the continuity of the holy Christian church. He was about to step into the procession of the Te Deum. His wife\u27s hand squeezed his as his name was called. Not too many years later late at night he sits wondering. It hasn\u27t turned out as he had dreamed. The opposition was more insidious, the apathy more deadening. Strangely, as time passed he had wondered more and more about himself - his own skills, his approaches. Maybe he just doesn\u27t have it; perhaps the way the ministry is set up is all wrong. Maybe he should get out now while he is still relatively young. The situation seems intolerable. God, what had happened

The Effects of Urbanization on the Function of the Church

The interest in this paper will not be the causes for the rise of urbanism or a study of the social ecology of the city. The emphasis will be on the social relationships in the city. We will ask the question of how these influences in urban areas have affected the function of the church in witnessing

\u27Your Job, Mr. President ... .

Good humor and a certain salty Lutheran irreverence are necessary on the day of a presidential inauguration to make sure we don\u27t believe every exaggeration spoken in the excitement of the occasion. You may remember the inauguration of a university president some years on the first anniversary of his inauguration ago. After two days of festivities and speeches suggesting that the fate of half of Western culture revolved about the decisions that would be made by the new president, a friend put his hand on his shoulder and said, \u27Look, George, forget all that stuff. You have three main jobs: to provide parking for the faculty, football for the alumni, and sex for the students

Labor, Industry, and the Church

The church stood amazed before the rising form of the industrial giant. Its size was frightening enough, but its two heads of unionism and management struck terror into her heart. The church felt she should say something to the monster. But then what could she say? It certainly didn\u27t look like a membership prospect. And so the church pretended she didn\u27t see it. But the church\u27s heart continued to pound. And way down deep she felt guilty. She had a message - even for such two-headed giants. And she should be speaking

Homiletics: Outlines on Synodical Conference Gospels

Outlines on Synodical Conference Gospel

Theological Education: Crisis and Renewal

The institutions of higher learning in the United States of America are undergoing rapid and profound changes. Theological education, for the most part, senses this feeling of change in the air but has been hesitant as to how to move. In many quarters the pressures for change are increasing; a rising sense of uneasiness is building. But the future appears indistinct enough so that those who should be exerting leadership on the level of the local seminary and denomination are pleading for more time

Decoherence and entanglement degradation of a qubit-qutrit system in non-inertial frames

We study the effect of decoherence on a qubit-qutrit system under the influence of global, local and multilocal decoherence in non-inertial frames. We show that the entanglement sudden death can be avoided in non-inertial frames in the presence of amplitude damping, depolarizing and phase damping channels. However, degradation of entanglement is seen due to Unruh effect. It is shown that for lower level of decoherence, the depolarizing channel degrades the entanglement more heavily as compared to the amplitude damping and phase damping channels. However, for higher values of decoherence parameters, amplitude damping channel heavily degrades the entanglement of the hybrid system. Further more, no ESD is seen for any value of Rob's acceleration.Comment: 16 pages, 5 .eps figures, 1 table; Quantum Information Processing, published online, 5 July, 201

Electrical Control of Plasmon Resonance with Graphene

Surface plasmon, with its unique capability to concentrate light into sub-wavelength volume, has enabled great advances in photon science, ranging from nano-antenna and single-molecule Raman scattering to plasmonic waveguide and metamaterials. In many applications it is desirable to control the surface plasmon resonance in situ with electric field. Graphene, with its unique tunable optical properties, provides an ideal material to integrate with nanometallic structures for realizing such control. Here we demonstrate effective modulation of the plasmon resonance in a model system composed of hybrid graphene-gold nanorod structure. Upon electrical gating the strong optical transitions in graphene can be switched on and off, which leads to significant modulation of both the resonance frequency and quality factor of plasmon resonance in gold nanorods. Hybrid graphene-nanometallic structures, as exemplified by this combination of graphene and gold nanorod, provide a general and powerful way for electrical control of plasmon resonances. It holds promise for novel active optical devices and plasmonic circuits at the deep subwavelength scale

Magnetic pinning of flux lattice in superconducting- nanomagnet hybrids

Strong superconducting pinning effects are observed from magnetic landscapes produced by arrays of circular rings with varying magnetic remanent states. The collective and the background pinning of superconducting Nb films is strongly enhanced by the stray magnetic field produced by an array of circular Ni rings magnetized to form “onion” (bidomain) states. On the other hand, when the same rings are magnetized into vortex (flux-closed) states, or are randomly magnetized, the superconducting pinning is much smaller. The greatest pinning is produced when the superconducting vortex lattice motion is along a direction in which there is a strong magnetic field variation