Problematizing partnership: the experience, perceptions, and insights of Ugandan church leaders in church partnership with Christians overseas, in juxtaposition with the Western literature

This research examines the experience and perceptions of church leaders in Mbale, Uganda engaged in ‘local-to-local’ relationships: direct, cross-continental, missional partnerships without mediation by traditional gatekeepers (typically Christian missionaries or ministries). Its findings are then compared to the literature, most of which originates in and adheres to global-north perspectives. A quantitative survey of church leaders found the incidence of these partnerships, gathered preliminary descriptive data, and uncovered specific cases for qualitative interviewing. Interviews with leaders and lay ministers followed, and lastly a review of secondary, historical literature was undertaken. This research shows that just under one-third of all churches are engaged in a localto- local partnership with Christians outside of Africa; furthermore, that these same churches are more likely to be engaged in two or three overseas relationships rather than only one. Partners function as alien, ancillary patrons whose patronage supplements that of local patron-pastors, the new gatekeepers in overseas partnership. Church leaders engage in instrumental friendships with overseas partners as a means of production for their clients in the religious marketplace. They must weigh the helpful products of partnership against its risks, including that partners can be stolen and are often agents of division, financial temptation, and doctrinal compromise. These results enable more open, profitable conversation in the literature by showing that local-to-local partnerships are more a product of history than a break with it, are sustained more by instrumental friendship than by relational solidarity, are more hierarchical than they are egalitarian, and are frequently contributors to division locally even as they build community trans-nationally. Lastly, this study commends the model and practice of covenant in the Biblical literature as a means of purposeful friendship across great geographic and cultural distances, building solidarity from distrust and difference, gifting growth to each other, and harnessing hierarchy to bring inclusive blessing

When and How in the History of Theology Did the Triune God Replace the Father as the Only True God?

A traditional view is that Christians have always believed that the one God is three Persons in one essence or being. Orthodox analytic theologian Beau Branson has recently argued that this is untrue, as earlier “fathers” taught that the one God just is the Father. He argues that this sensible Eastern view was misunderstood by Western sources, which is how the idea of the one God as tripersonal entered into mainstream Christian theologies. While I agree with Branson that in about the first three Christian centuries the teaching was that the one God just is the Father, I argue that his account about when and how the idea of a triune God comes in is mistaken, because we can see this new idea of a tripersonal God appearing in both Eastern and Western sources around the time of the council at Constantinople in 381, the surviving statement of which is the earliest “official” creed which assumes and implies that the one God is the Trinity, the tripersonal God

Craig's Contradictory Christ

William Lane Craig’s “Neo-Apollinarian” christology aims to give us a model of Incarnation which seems not to imply any contradiction, and which fits well with the Bible and with at least the creed from the fourth ecumenical council. It is argued that the theory fails to achieve any of these goals

Rule-governed allomorphy can be suppletive also

Commonly occurring linguistic forms, including allomorphs, tend to be learned (listed in speakers\u27 mental lexicons) even if they are formed according to the pattern of a linguistic rule. They thus have dual motivation: the motivation given by the rule, and the suppletive motivation of their having been learned. This accounts for the otherwise inexplicable persistence of rule-governed allomorphy when the conditioning environment is destroyed through diachronic change, producing apparent positive exceptions to the rule

The Antigone Constraint

In this paper I will present a class of sentences that certain syntactic rules of English would be expected to produce, but which are ungrammatical. These sentences all involve the raising of a sentential NP and the subsequent application of some syntactic rule fo that sentential NP. To explain the ungrammaticality of these sentences, I propose a constraint called the Antigone Constraint, which prohibits two-storey rules from applying to clauses which have been raised

Aztec causative/applicatives in Space Grammar

From the introduction: There are in Aztecan generally a number of verbal suffixes which function as causatives or as applicatives. (Applicatives often translate by dative movement structures in other languages.) Some of these suffixes are usually causatives, others are usually applicatives, but all function at times in both categories. All also function as verbalizing suffixes, mostly on nouns but often on adjectives and postpositions as well. in each case the suffix has a constant phonological shape and constant morphological properties such as position-class in the verb, conditioning of stem-formation rules, pattern of tense-formation, etc., which make it desirable to treat it as one suffix in spite of its different functions and meanings. This type of phenomenon occurs elsewhere (e.g. the Germanic prefix be- as in English be-speak, be-lie, be-friend, be-little, be-labor, and even be-low shows some very interesting parallels); see also Comrie (1981. 176). I will confine this discussion to a very few forms, all involving a single suffix, -tiya, which is one of a half dozen such suffixes in the dialect of Nahuatl (or Aztec) spoken in Tetelcingo, Morelos. [Data] An important theoretical problem such data raise is this: can causatives and applicatives and the various other structures associated with suffixes like -tiya be analyzed in such a way as to show their relatedness, accounting for the tremendous amount of overlap, or not? Most theories of syntax with which I am acquainted do not allow this: they force us to posit a cluster of accidentally homophonous suffixes which are quite separate from each other in terms of their meanings (if they in fact have any) and of their syntactic behavior