On Taking One\u27s Daily Dip in the Font: Baptismal Piety

(Excerpt) The wife of a faculty colleague of mine has a serious problem with hip deterioration. Daily she goes to the local Y for a swim. For her a pool plunge is a matter of life and health. Most baptismal fonts are much too small for such a daily dip. At best they might serve as a bath for robin redbreast who like all birds knows how to bathe in the shallowest of pools. Whether as a pool plunge or as a sprinkling bath, a daily dip in baptism\u27s font is a matter of spiritual life and health. Such a daily dip is ever so much more than baptismal piety if piety means only ritual practice and devotional activity associated with baptism. Such a daily dip has theological grounding in the meaning of baptism. Taking one\u27s daily dip in the font is necessary when you have been baptized. Baptismal piety can help the daily dip take place

Using A Breakout Box to Encourage the 4Cs in the Classroom

Small groups can benefit from practicing the “4Cs” skills that will continue to be important in the 21st century (NEA, 2017): Critical thinking Communication Collaboration Creativityhttps://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/btp_expo/1021/thumbnail.jp

The Feeling of Religious Longing and Passionate Rationality

What is the feeling of religious longing and how, if at all, can religious longing justify religious beliefs? Starting with an analogy between religious longing and basic physical needs and an analogy between religious longing and musical longing, I argue that the feeling of religious longing is characterized by four features: its generality, its indeterminate transcendent object which by its nature is not capable of empirical verification or falsification, its mode of being infinitely interested in passion and its ambiguity with regard to our own power and powerlessness. Religious longing can neither epistemically nor pragmatically justify religious beliefs. If we want to account for the rationality of religious beliefs motivated by religious longing, we have to consider passionate rationality as a third kind of rationality. We wholeheartedly take as true what we experience as a condition of the possibility of life

Growth of single-crystal gallium nitride

Use of ultrahigh purity ammonia prevents oxygen contamination of GaN during growth, making it possible to grow the GaN at temperatures as high as 825 degrees C, at which point single crystal wafers are deposited on /0001/-oriented sapphire surfaces

Integrating trait-based empirical and modeling research to improve ecological restoration

A global ecological restoration agenda has led to ambitious programs in environmental policy to mitigate declines in biodiversity and ecosystem services. Current restoration programs can incompletely return desired ecosystem service levels, while resilience of restored ecosystems to future threats is unknown. It is therefore essential to advance understanding and better utilize knowledge from ecological literature in restoration approaches. We identified an incomplete linkage between global change ecology, ecosystem function research, and restoration ecology. This gap impedes a full understanding of the interactive effects of changing environmental factors on the long-term provision of ecosystem functions and a quantification of trade-offs and synergies among multiple services. Approaches that account for the effects of multiple changing factors on the composition of plant traits and their direct and indirect impact on the provision of ecosystem functions and services can close this gap. However, studies on this multilayered relationship are currently missing. We therefore propose an integrated restoration agenda complementing trait-based empirical studies with simulation modeling. We introduce an ongoing case study to demonstrate how this framework could allow systematic assessment of the impacts of interacting environmental factors on long-term service provisioning. Our proposed agenda will benefit restoration programs by suggesting plant species compositions with specific traits that maximize the supply of multiple ecosystem services in the long term. Once the suggested compositions have been implemented in actual restoration projects, these assemblages should be monitored to assess whether they are resilient as well as to improve model parameterization. Additionally, the integration of empirical and simulation modeling research can improve global outcomes by raising the awareness of which restoration goals can be achieved, due to the quantification of trade-offs and synergies among ecosystem services under a wide range of environmental conditions

P-n junctions formed in gallium antimonide

Vapor phase deposition process forms a heavily doped n-region on a melt-grown p-type gallium antimonide substrate. HCl transports gallium to the reaction zone, where it combines with antimony hydride and the dopant carrier, hydrogen telluride. Temperatures as low as 400 degrees C are required

Controlled substrate cooling improves reproducibility of vapor deposited semiconductor composites

Improved substrate holder preferentially provides more uniform substrate cooling and increases the proportion of vapor flowing over the substrate during growth. Nitrogen gas is constricted in the substrate holder to cool the substrate

Outlaws and Traitors: Justifying Rebellion in the Old French Epic of Revolt

The plot of many chansons de geste hinges on acts that would have been considered treasonable by medieval legal custom. Yet despite conspicuously treasonous behavior, rebel characters remain the heroes of the tales. Coming to an understanding of the esoteric way that medieval poets and their audiences would have perceived the difference between rebel characters and traitor characters is the pursuit of this study. Through an investigation of the narrative logic and poetic details of epic poems like Girart de Vienne and other chansons de geste, the divergence between treachery and rebellion can be shown to reside in narrative strategies like the noble robber tale, in essentializing discourse that ascribes traits to characters through lineage and essence regardless of actions, and in appeals to an audience largely made up of young knights whose late twelfth-century world was undergoing massive changes that threatened their expectations about life. This study shows that it is not so much about a difference between rebellion and treachery, but a difference between rebels and traitors