Mennonite missionaries and African Independent Churches: the development of an Anabaptist missiology in West Africa: 1958-1967

This dissertation analyzes Mennonite missionary engagement with African Independent Churches in West Africa. The engagement between missionaries and indigenous churches gave rise to a novel mission interaction with a non-western form of Christianity. It led to the early development of mission strategy and theory from an intentionally Anabaptist perspective. Based upon close analysis of archival material, the dissertation examines the extended encounter between missionaries and Independents in southeastern Nigeria between 1958 and 1967. It places the encounter within the context of the religious history of both groups and outlines the influence of the experience on subsequent mission work. This case study sheds new light on the emergence of African indigenous Christian movements and western Christians’ interaction with those movements during the period of decolonization and African nationalism. The history that this study constructs shows that the religious and missiological assumptions that each party brought to the encounter complicated their relationship. The Independents’ religious history led them to expect missionaries to establish traditional mission educational and healthcare institutions that would reinforce their well-being. Missionaries Edwin and Irene Weaver and their colleagues were hesitant to do so, since their experience in India had convinced them that such institutions caused dependency on foreign funds and impeded indigenization. They focused, rather, on encouraging better relationships between estranged Independents and mission churches, capacitating Independent churches through biblical training, and reinforcing Independents’ indigenous identity. Yet some Nigerian Independents insisted on a traditional mission relationship and its accompanying Mennonite identity. Missionaries borrowed mission theory about indigenization from the wider missionary movement, but applied and modified it over time, finally incorporating it into an Anabaptist missionary approach for work in Nigeria, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire and the Republic of Benin. This study suggests that while relationships between streams of the Christian movement are conditioned by their different religious histories and cultures, they nevertheless generate missiological insights. Through this engagement missionaries articulated an Anabaptist missiology that became influential throughout Africa. In turn, the Mennonite missionary presence enabled some Nigerian Independents to network successfully with the world Christian movement via their Mennonite affiliation

The Golden Rule:Interfaith Peacemaking and the Charter for Compassion

The Charter for Compassion has been signed by over two million people from around the world and partnered with hundreds of interfaith organizations and cities seeking to put into practice the Golden Rule, common to the main faith traditions, of doing unto others as you would be done by. This article sets the Charter within the context of a post secular international society and faith-based diplomacy, in which religious interreligious initiatives emerge as serious, rather than peripheral, actors in developing sustainable peace making through bottom-up approaches. The article critically engages with the Charter's claim that ‘any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate’ while accepting that peaceful interpretations of scriptures are helpful to peace processes where religious actors are involved. The article explores the claims of the Charter for Compassion International as they seek to make peace through compassion, before concluding that the Charter for Compassion is a long-term project aimed at changing hearts and minds but has had limited substantive impact to date

Evaluation of individual and ensemble probabilistic forecasts of COVID-19 mortality in the United States

Short-term probabilistic forecasts of the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States have served as a visible and important communication channel between the scientific modeling community and both the general public and decision-makers. Forecasting models provide specific, quantitative, and evaluable predictions that inform short-term decisions such as healthcare staffing needs, school closures, and allocation of medical supplies. Starting in April 2020, the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub (https://covid19forecasthub.org/) collected, disseminated, and synthesized tens of millions of specific predictions from more than 90 different academic, industry, and independent research groups. A multimodel ensemble forecast that combined predictions from dozens of groups every week provided the most consistently accurate probabilistic forecasts of incident deaths due to COVID-19 at the state and national level from April 2020 through October 2021. The performance of 27 individual models that submitted complete forecasts of COVID-19 deaths consistently throughout this year showed high variability in forecast skill across time, geospatial units, and forecast horizons. Two-thirds of the models evaluated showed better accuracy than a naïve baseline model. Forecast accuracy degraded as models made predictions further into the future, with probabilistic error at a 20-wk horizon three to five times larger than when predicting at a 1-wk horizon. This project underscores the role that collaboration and active coordination between governmental public-health agencies, academic modeling teams, and industry partners can play in developing modern modeling capabilities to support local, state, and federal response to outbreaks

The United States COVID-19 Forecast Hub dataset

Academic researchers, government agencies, industry groups, and individuals have produced forecasts at an unprecedented scale during the COVID-19 pandemic. To leverage these forecasts, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) partnered with an academic research lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to create the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub. Launched in April 2020, the Forecast Hub is a dataset with point and probabilistic forecasts of incident cases, incident hospitalizations, incident deaths, and cumulative deaths due to COVID-19 at county, state, and national, levels in the United States. Included forecasts represent a variety of modeling approaches, data sources, and assumptions regarding the spread of COVID-19. The goal of this dataset is to establish a standardized and comparable set of short-term forecasts from modeling teams. These data can be used to develop ensemble models, communicate forecasts to the public, create visualizations, compare models, and inform policies regarding COVID-19 mitigation. These open-source data are available via download from GitHub, through an online API, and through R packages

Harnessing the Power of Data to Improve Agricultural Policy and Conservation Outcomes

Relevant public and private agriculture data in the United States tend to be decentralized and disorganized. Section 12618 of the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 is an important first step toward promoting research that will enable changes in agriculture policies and practices

Radiation Organ Doses Received in a Nationwide Cohort of U.S. Radiologic Technologists: Methods and Findings

In this article, we describe recent methodological enhancements and findings from the dose reconstruction component of a study of health risks among U.S. radiologic technologists. An earlier version of the dosimetry published in 2006 used physical and statistical models, literature-reported exposure measurements for the years before 1960, and archival personnel monitoring badge data from cohort members through 1984. The data and models previously described were used to estimate annual occupational radiation doses for 90,000 radiological technologists, incorporating information about each individual's employment practices based on a baseline survey conducted in the mid-1980s. The dosimetry methods presented here, while using many of the same methods as before, now estimate 2.23 million annual badge doses (personal dose equivalent) for the years 1916–1997 for 110,374 technologists, but with numerous methodological improvements. Every technologist's annual dose is estimated as a probability density function to reflect uncertainty about the true dose. Multiple realizations of the entire cohort distribution were derived to account for shared uncertainties and possible biases in the input data and assumptions used. Major improvements in the dosimetry methods from the earlier version include: A substantial increase in the number of cohort member annual badge dose measurements; Additional information on individual apron usage obtained from surveys conducted in the mid-1990s and mid-2000s; Refined modeling to develop lognormal annual badge dose probability density functions using censored data regression models; Refinements of cohort-based annual badge probability density functions to reflect individual work patterns and practices reported on questionnaires and to more accurately assess minimum detection limits; and Extensive refinements in organ dose conversion coefficients to account for uncertainties in radiographic machine settings for the radiographic techniques employed. For organ dose estimation, we rely on well-researched assumptions about critical exposure-related variables and their changes over the decades, including the peak kilovoltage and filtration typically used in conducting radiographic examinations, and the usual body location for wearing radiation monitoring badges, the latter based on both literature and national recommendations. We have derived organ dose conversion coefficients based on air-kerma weighting of photon fluences from published X-ray spectra and derived energy-dependent transmission factors for protective lead aprons of different thicknesses. Findings are presented on estimated organ doses for 12 organs and tissues: red bone marrow, female breast, thyroid, brain, lung, heart, colon, ovary, testes, skin of trunk, skin of head and neck and arms, and lens of the eye