Prostitutes, Prodigals and the Story of God\u27s Embrace

Excerpt: This book has been stewing inside of me for a long time. When I was sixteen years old, I sat in a living room in Round Rock, Texas at a Young Life meeting and heard a college kid tell the story of Hosea and Gomer and then say, God loves us like that. I\u27d never heard anything like that and I now know that Hosea was not a story regularly told in Young Life. I have no idea why my Young Life leader chose it. Regardless, that image has stuck in my head for almost thirty years. Other experiences along the way; in ministry, my personal life, my life with my family or books that I have read have lodged themselves in my mind as well. Together they have formed a sort of stew brewing in the crockpot of my head and my heart. This book is an attempt to communicate what has come from all of that

Building Networks of Enterprise: Sustained Learning in the Writing Center

This essay examines the learning processes of writing center professionals through the lens of “networks of enterprise” (Wallace & Gruber, 1989), which reflects on the dynamic processes through which creative people, like writing center professionals (WCPs), bring together the diverse and complex tasks undertaken in their everyday work into a cohesive and satisfying career. While there is substantial turnover in the profession, some WCPs stay in writing center positions for decades. Drawing on information gathered through surveys and interviews with ten long-term WCPs (with an average of 28 years of experience), as well as reflecting on his own career, the author attempts to discern what long-term learning WCPs take away from work. This piece shares participants’ responses to the following questions: (1) What do writing center professionals learn from the diversity of their duties and long-term exposure to the ideas of writers from a multitude of disciplines? (2) Are the lessons, processes, or theories, WCPs encounter in the center of use in their own scholarly, administrative, or creative pursuits? (3) To what degree does such learning make WCPs better at their jobs and motivate them to spend years or even an entire career in the writing center? Though not unanimous, the participants’ answers indicate that WCPs do indeed gain and apply to their work —including their own creative and academic writing projects — a deep, broad, and ever-growing network of knowledge gained from tutoring, training tutors, teaching, and performing the many practical, rhetorical, political, and administrative tasks required in these positions. Most, though not all participants, cited the building of such knowledge as a key motivation for spending their career in or around writing centers

Atonement in Hosea and the Prodigal Son: Relationality as Personhood and the Being of God

Excerpt from Introduction: My project will provide a survey of traditional atonement metaphors, with a particular emphasis upon contrasting penal substitution with a covenantal relational understanding of the atonement, and will then posit that a covenantal relational approach is ideal for resonance with a postmodern audience. I will seek to determine whether any single biblical metaphor or cluster of metaphors provides an interpretive matrix for all discussion of the atonement in a way that is both biblically faithful and conceptually accessible to a postmodern world. I contend that atonement discussions in typical evangelical contexts may be both biblically insufficient and culturally inadequate and that alternatives exist which address both issues. I believe it possible to engage with atonement theology in a metaphoric landscape that resonates with the postmodern experience of life and scripture as the reader encounters it. This engagement will enable the reader to be better able to access the transformative power of the atonement in his or her life

Theologia: Quaker Youth Ministry and Theopraxis in a Multicultural Context

I am convinced by my own life and by wide observation of children that mystical experience is much more common than is usually supposed. Children are not so absorbed as we are with things and with problems. They are not so completely organized for dealing with the outside world as we older persons are. They do not live by cut-and-dried theories. They have more room for surprise and wonder. They are more sensitive to intimations, flashes, openings. The invisible impinges on their souls and they feel its reality as something quite natural.” —Rufus M. Jones, “Finding the Trail of Life”1 In 2015, faculty of George Fox University applied for the Lilly Endowment Youth Theology Initiative. The goal of this grant initiative was to deepen the level of theological engagement among young people in ways beyond standard evangelical church youth groups. During that year, a group of faculty and ministry leaders gathered to plan and submit a proposal to build a high school theology camp, hosted by George Fox University, in alignment with our historical heritage as a Quaker institution. We developed the idea of a week-long camp, a summer institute held on campus where a small group of 25 high school students would engage in theology not only in the classroom, but primarily through experiential learning. In accordance with the grant, we were committed to running our camp with the values of our university’s Quaker heritage in two specific ways: an egalitarian structure and the acknowledgement of the “Inner Light” of Christ in everyone. Now having completed three years of the theology camp, “Theologia,” from 2017–2019, this article offers a reflection on these values and experiences as a report of our findings on doing youth ministry in a multicultural context as informed by Quaker values. Each author of this article carried a major role in the design and execution of the camp; though our own theological and ecclesial backgrounds cover a wide range of traditions, we have endeavored to remain committed to distinctive Quaker values. Following an overview of a typical day in the camp and our reflection on the two specific values, we address the impact of the camp, both for the students and for our vision of how this camp impacts our Christian Ministries department at George Fox University. It is our aim that this paper will catalyze a greater dialogue on Quaker values and the praxis of youth ministry

An Autonomous Earth Observing Sensorweb

We describe a network of sensors linked by software and the internet to an autonomous satellite observation response capability. This system of systems is designed with a flexible, modular, architecture to facilitate expansion in sensors, customization of trigger conditions, and customization of responses. This system has been used to implement a global surveillance program of science phenomena including: volcanoes, flooding, cryosphere events, and atmospheric phenomena. In this paper we describe the importance of the earth observing sensorweb application as well as overall architecture for the network

ASPEN Version 3.0

The Automated Scheduling and Planning Environment (ASPEN) computer program has been updated to version 3.0. ASPEN is a modular, reconfigurable, application software framework for solving batch problems that involve reasoning about time, activities, states, and resources. Applications of ASPEN can include planning spacecraft missions, scheduling of personnel, and managing supply chains, inventories, and production lines. ASPEN 3.0 can be customized for a wide range of applications and for a variety of computing environments that include various central processing units and random access memories

The TechSat 21 Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment

Software has been developed to perform a number of functions essential to autonomous operation in the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment (ASE), which is scheduled to be demonstrated aboard a constellation of three spacecraft, denoted TechSat 21, to be launched by the Air Force into orbit around the Earth in January 2006. A prior version of this software was reported in Software for an Autonomous Constellation of Satellites (NPO-30355), NASA Tech Briefs, Vol. 26, No. 11 (November 2002), page 44. The software includes the following components: Algorithms to analyze image data, generate scientific data products, and detect conditions, features, and events of potential scientific interest; A program that uses component-based computational models of hardware to analyze anomalous situations and to generate novel command sequences, including (when possible) commands to repair components diagnosed as faulty; A robust-execution-management component that uses the Spacecraft Command Language (SCL) software to enable event-driven processing and low-level autonomy; and The Continuous Activity Scheduling, Planning, Execution, and Replanning (CASPER) program for replanning activities, including downlink sessions, on the basis of scientific observations performed during previous orbit cycles

OFLOPS: An Open Framework for Openflow Switch Evaluation,” in PAM,

Abstract. Recent efforts in software-defined networks, such as OpenFlow, give unprecedented access into the forwarding plane of networking equipment. When building a network based on OpenFlow however, one must take into account the performance characteristics of particular OpenFlow switch implementations. In this paper, we present OFLOPS, an open and generic software framework that permits the development of tests for OpenFlow-enabled switches, that measure the capabilities and bottlenecks between the forwarding engine of the switch and the remote control application. OFLOPS combines hardware instrumentation with an extensible software framework. We use OFLOPS to evaluate current OpenFlow switch implementations and make the following observations: (i) The switching performance of flows depends on applied actions and firmware. (ii) Current OpenFlow implementations differ substantially in flow updating rates as well as traffic monitoring capabilities. (iii) Accurate OpenFlow command completion can be observed only through the data plane. These observations are crucial for understanding the applicability of OpenFlow in the context of specific use-cases, which have requirements in terms of forwarding table consistency, flow setup latency, flow space granularity, packet modification types, and/or traffic monitoring abilities

OFLOPS: An Open Framework for Openflow Switch Evaluation,” in PAM,

Abstract. Recent efforts in software-defined networks, such as OpenFlow, give unprecedented access into the forwarding plane of networking equipment. When building a network based on OpenFlow however, one must take into account the performance characteristics of particular OpenFlow switch implementations. In this paper, we present OFLOPS, an open and generic software framework that permits the development of tests for OpenFlow-enabled switches, that measure the capabilities and bottlenecks between the forwarding engine of the switch and the remote control application. OFLOPS combines hardware instrumentation with an extensible software framework. We use OFLOPS to evaluate current OpenFlow switch implementations and make the following observations: (i) The switching performance of flows depends on applied actions and firmware. (ii) Current OpenFlow implementations differ substantially in flow updating rates as well as traffic monitoring capabilities. (iii) Accurate OpenFlow command completion can be observed only through the data plane. These observations are crucial for understanding the applicability of OpenFlow in the context of specific use-cases, which have requirements in terms of forwarding table consistency, flow setup latency, flow space granularity, packet modification types, and/or traffic monitoring abilities