John Howard Shakespeare and the English Baptists, 1898-1924

The Rev. John Howard Shakespeare was General Secretary of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Ireland from 1898 until his resignation on the grounds of ill health in 1924. This thesis describes and evaluates changes in the Baptist denomination in England during that period, and assesses the significance of Shakespeare’s contribution. Following summaries of the history of Baptist ecclesiology and Shakespeare’s personal background, the main areas of denominational reform are described. The first of these is the strengthening of the Baptist Union and the expansion of its influence, which was the major feature of the period up to about 1908. This presented a challenge to the Baptists' traditional congregational church polity. The second is the changing approach to the recognition and support of Baptist ministers within the denomination, culminating in the 1916 Baptist Union Ministerial Settlement and Sustentation Scheme. The third is Shakespeare's search for church unity, both within Nonconformity and between Nonconformists and the Church of England, which dominated the post-war period. The formation of the Federal Council of the Evangelical Free Churches, of which Shakespeare was the first Moderator, in 1919, and conversations following the 1920 Lambeth Appeal, were central elements of this search. It had significant implications for Baptist church polity. Shakespeare's approach to the question of women in the ministry, and the circumstances surrounding his resignation, are also described. A final chapter discusses Shakespeare's legacy for Baptists. The institutions he created have played an important part in the subsequent history of Baptists and Nonconformity in general. However, they failed to achieve his objective of stemming numerical decline. They also exacerbated tensions in Baptist church polity between the centralisation of denominational life and Congregationalism. These tensions have been a major factor in Baptist church life throughout the present century

Who are Church Schools For? Towards an Ecclesiology for Church of England Voluntary Aided Secondary Schools

There is a mismatch between the Church of England's own self-conception and the realities of modern post-Christian England, which consists in a failure to recognise the vestigial nature and redundancy of a 'church for the nation' ecclesiology in an age when the CE is clearly, in classical sociological terms, a denomination-type. This impacts on the practice and perceived function of Anglican Christianity, and although baptism is treated as illustrative, the principle focus is the role and purpose of CE secondary schools, viewed theoretically within a spectrum of ecclesiological modelling, and more practically as responding to recent ecclesio-political imperatives, notably the Dearing Report of 2001, and the rhetoric and debate surrounding its release and subsequent mutation. The first section (Chapters 1 and 2) is diagnostic of the current state of the church, reviewing sociological and cultural theory, and arguing on ecclesiological grounds that the CE now has the status of one denomination among many, which implies a more modest and realistic role in its affairs, particularly in the education system, than the traditional ecclesia (church)/establishment model might have entailed. The second section (Chapters 3 - 6) traces the history of the CE's educational role, and examines the crucial issue for understanding the purpose of church schools: admissions policies. In this discussion the links between admission to the church (baptism) and admission to the church school are drawn out and explored. The framework established in the first section is used to illuminate the argument of the third section (Chapters 7 and 8) which provides a detailed account of the church's current role in education represented by the appearance and reception of the Dearing Report in 2001. The contention is that the attachment to the 'church for the nation' model has led to complicity with contemporary political expedients at the cost of a meaningful identity for church schools. The conclusion is that recognition of the more modest status of the CE would provide a clear rationale for its schools in particular, and Faith Schools in general. Chapter 8 offers an alternative voice to 'Dearing'. The final chapter, having investigated wider yet germane issues, provides an ecclesiological model of the 'single Faith nurture' school

Shortest Path versus Multi-Hub Routing in Networks with Uncertain Demand

We study a class of robust network design problems motivated by the need to scale core networks to meet increasingly dynamic capacity demands. Past work has focused on designing the network to support all hose matrices (all matrices not exceeding marginal bounds at the nodes). This model may be too conservative if additional information on traffic patterns is available. Another extreme is the fixed demand model, where one designs the network to support peak point-to-point demands. We introduce a capped hose model to explore a broader range of traffic matrices which includes the above two as special cases. It is known that optimal designs for the hose model are always determined by single-hub routing, and for the fixed- demand model are based on shortest-path routing. We shed light on the wider space of capped hose matrices in order to see which traffic models are more shortest path-like as opposed to hub-like. To address the space in between, we use hierarchical multi-hub routing templates, a generalization of hub and tree routing. In particular, we show that by adding peak capacities into the hose model, the single-hub tree-routing template is no longer cost-effective. This initiates the study of a class of robust network design (RND) problems restricted to these templates. Our empirical analysis is based on a heuristic for this new hierarchical RND problem. We also propose that it is possible to define a routing indicator that accounts for the strengths of the marginals and peak demands and use this information to choose the appropriate routing template. We benchmark our approach against other well-known routing templates, using representative carrier networks and a variety of different capped hose traffic demands, parameterized by the relative importance of their marginals as opposed to their point-to-point peak demands

PIRUS2: Creating a Common Standard for Measuring Online Usage of Individual Articles

This presentation will provide an overview of the PIRUS2 project and will cover the project's background, its main objectives, the planned deliverables, and the benefits to the main stakeholder groups involved in scholarly information, including repositories. A progress report on the project will also be provided