Theological Empathy and John Wesley’s Missional Field Preaching

John Wesley cited several external reasons for his submission to field-preaching. These external factors include the persuasive requests of George Whitefield, the effectiveness of open-air preaching, and the closed doors of the Anglican Church. These usual suspects have received much attention among Wesley scholars. However, a closer look at Wesley’s writings, especially his A Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, reveals that internal motivators were at least as much to blame as external ones for driving Wesley to the fields. What initiated and sustained Wesley’s field-preaching for fifty-one years, despite the many inconveniences and dangers associated with this homiletic practice? This study seeks to show that Wesley’s sanctification, nurtured by his theological understanding of God as love and his empathic affections for neighbor, drove Wesley into the fields. This study concludes with an exploration of the implications of Wesley’s theological empathy for the practice and teaching of preaching today

Theological Empathy and John Wesley’s Missional Field Preaching

John Wesley cited several external reasons for his submission to field-preaching. These external factors include the persuasive requests of George Whitefield, the effectiveness of open-air preaching, and the closed doors of the Anglican Church. These usual suspects have received much attention among Wesley scholars. However, a closer look at Wesley’s writings, especially his A Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, reveals that internal motivators were at least as much to blame as external ones for driving Wesley to the fields. What initiated and sustained Wesley’s field-preaching for fifty-one years, despite the many inconveniences and dangers associated with this homiletic practice? This study seeks to show that Wesley’s sanctification, nurtured by his theological understanding of God as love and his empathic affections for neighbor, drove Wesley into the fields. This study concludes with an exploration of the implications of Wesley’s theological empathy for the practice and teaching of preaching today

Theological Empathy and John Wesley’s Missional Field Preaching

John Wesley cited several external reasons for his submission to field-preaching. These external factors include the persuasive requests of George Whitefield, the effectiveness of open-air preaching, and the closed doors of the Anglican Church. These usual suspects have received much attention among Wesley scholars. However, a closer look at Wesley’s writings, especially his A Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, reveals that internal motivators were at least as much to blame as external ones for driving Wesley to the fields. What initiated and sustained Wesley’s field-preaching for fifty-one years, despite the many inconveniences and dangers associated with this homiletic practice? This study seeks to show that Wesley’s sanctification, nurtured by his theological understanding of God as love and his empathic affections for neighbor, drove Wesley into the fields. This study concludes with an exploration of the implications of Wesley’s theological empathy for the practice and teaching of preaching today

On the Relationship between Four-Dimensionalism and Perdurance

ABSTRACT A relevant part of the literature about the metaphysical problem of persistence of concrete particulars exhibits, I believe, too much freedom as far as the use of terms like “Four-Dimensionalism”, “Perdurantism” and “Doctrine of temporal parts” is concerned. This attitude clashes against the rigorous and valid arguments of many four-dimensionalist views and it is mainly due to a lack of precision on the four-dimensionalist side.In this work I analyse Parsons’ (2000) attempt to clarify the content of these notions. His clarification, based on the postulation of a difference between temporal parts and temporal extent, is aimed at demonstrating that Four-Dimensionalism and Perdurantism have not the same content and are not tied by any apriori connection.I endorse Parsons’ clarification as legitimate from a logical and semantic point of view, but I maintain that, despite his useful distinction between Perdurantism as a theory of persistence and Four-Dimensionalism as a theory of extension, these doctrines are ultimately equivalent, when it comes to formulating a general view about material objects. Indeed, I argue that objects extended four-dimensionally necessarily persist by perduring, and perduring objects necessarily extend four-dimensionally in space-time

The optical field angle distortion calibration feasibility study for the Hubble Space Telescope fine guidance sensors

The results of an analytical study to investigate the feasibility of calibrating the Hubble Space Telescope's (HST's) fine guidance sensors (FGSs) within HST mission accuracy limits are presented. The study has two purposes: (1) to determine the mathematical feasibility of the optical field angle distortion (OFAD) calibration algorithm and (2) to confirm that the OFAD, plate scale, and FGS-to-FGS alignment calibration algorithms produced a calibration of the FGSs that satisfied mission requirements. The study concluded that the mathematical specification of the OFAD algorithm is adequate and permits a determination of the FGS calibration parameters (accurate to better than 0.003 arc-second) sufficient to meet the mission requirements. The algorithms implemented, the characteristics of the simulated data and procedures for data analysis, and the study's results are discussed. In addition, several useful techniques for improving the stability and accuracy of the OFAD solution are outlined

The Quantification of Intelligence in Nineteenth‑Century Craniology: An Epistemology of Measurement Perspective

Craniology – the practice of inferring intelligence differences from the measurementof human skulls – survived the dismissal of phrenology and remained a widely popularresearch program until the end of the nineteenth century. From the 1970s, historiansand sociologists of science extensively focused on the explicit and implicitsocio-cultural biases invalidating the evidence and claims that craniology produced.Building on this literature, I reassess the history of craniological practice from adifferent but complementary perspective that relies on recent developments in theepistemology of measurement. More precisely, I identify two aspects of the measurementculture of nineteenth-century craniologists that are crucial to understandthe lack of validity of craniological inference: their neglect of the problem of coordinationfor their presupposed quantification of intelligence and their narrow viewof calibration. Based on my analysis, I claim that these methodological shortcomingsamplified the impact of the socio-cultural biases of craniologists, which had apervasive role in their evidential use of measurement. Finally, my argument showshow the epistemology of measurement perspective can offer useful tools in debatesconcerning the use of biological evidence to foster social discourse and for analyzingthe relationship between theory, evidence, and measurement

Scientific Coordination beyond the A Priori: A Three-dimensional Account of Constitutive Elements in Scientific Practice

In this dissertation, I present a novel account of the components that have a peculiar epistemic role in our scientific inquiries, since they contribute to establishing a form of coordination. The issue of coordination is a classic epistemic problem concerning how we justify our use of abstract conceptual tools to represent concrete phenomena. For instance, how could we get to represent universal gravitation as a mathematical formula or temperature by means of a numerical scale? This problem is particularly pressing when justification for using these abstract tools comes, in part or entirely, from knowledge which is not independent from them, thus leading to threats of circularity. Achieving coordination between some abstract conceptual tools and the concrete phenomena that they are supposed to represent is usually a complex process, which involves several epistemic components. Some of these components eventually provide stable conditions for applying those abstract representations to concrete phenomena. It is in this sense of providing certain conditions of applicability that different philosophical traditions, as well as some contemporary reappraisals, view these components as constitutive or a priori. In this work, I present a new gradualist, contextualist, and relational approach to understand these constitutive components of scientific inquiry. It is gradualist inasmuch as the degree to which some component is constitutive depends on three quantifiable features: quasi-axiomaticity, generative potential, and empirical shielding. Since the quantification of these three features impinges on the history and practice of using these components in a scientific context, my approach is a contextualist one. Finally, my approach is relational in a double sense: first, it identifies ordinal relationships among epistemic components with respect to their constitutive character; second, these relationships are relative to a scientific framework of inquiry. After introducing my account and a classic example of constitutively a priori principles, i.e., Friedman’s (2001) analysis of Newtonian mechanics, I turn to my own case studies to demonstrate the advantages of my approach. Firstly, I discuss Okasha’s (2018) view of endogenization as a pervasive theoretical strategy in evolutionary biology and suggest that the constitutive character of the core Darwinian principles progressively increases with endogenization. Secondly, I apply a conceptual distinction between two varieties or scopes of coordination – general coordination and coordination in measurement – to Ohm’s work on electrical conductivity. This distinction allows me to pinpoint to what extent components along different dimensions (e.g., instrumentation, measurement, theorising, etc.) were constitutive of the forms of coordination which Ohm relied on. Thirdly, I discuss the epistemic function of the Hardy-Weinberg principle in the history and practice of population genetics. I assess this principle in terms of my account and identify approximation and stability as two components that are highly constitutive, in that they contribute to justifying its use in population genetics. Finally, applying my account to these case studies enables me to identify at least three qualitatively different types of constitutive components: domain-specific theoretical principles, material components, and domain-independent assumptions underlying reasoning abilities. In the light of my results, I draw some general conclusions on epistemic justification and scientific knowledge

A journey in preaching as a spiritual discipline

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/ecommonsatsdissertations/1371/thumbnail.jp

Molecular phylogenetics and mitochondrial evolution

The myth of a "typical" mitochondrial genome (mtDNA) is a rock-hard belief in the field of genetics, at least for the animal kingdo