Search Results (17)

This article argues that John Calvin’s account of the church in Institutes of the Christian Religion IV is best read through the formative logic of worship. Calvin famously identifies preaching the Word and administering the sacraments as the marks of the visible church. Rather than regarding these marks merely as identifiers, this study interprets them as worship practices that shape Christian life “in-between” church and society. First, the preached Word is not simply received as information but functions as the medium through which faith is generated and sustained, forming a community tasked to bear truth publicly. Second, the sacraments operate as embodied theology: baptism initiates believers into ecclesial belonging through cleansing, renewal, and confession, while the Lord’s Supper repeatedly schools the church in remembrance, thanksgiving, unity, and mutual love. Finally, by situating the Word and sacrament within the church’s maternal nurture and the ministry of reconciliation, the article shows how worship extends beyond the sanctuary, cultivating conscience and communal practices oriented toward public peace and responsibility. In Calvin’s Reformation vision, worship is thus the hinge that links ecclesiology to social ethics without collapsing the distinction between the church and civil society. Full article

Elderly people make up an increasingly large part of society and the Church. The theme of old age is also increasingly present in papal teaching. This is evidenced, for example, by the series of Wednesday Catecheses on old age delivered by Pope Francis in 2022, or by the establishment of the World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly. Given the importance of the presence of the elderly, this article aims to present old age in the perspective of faith, and the importance of the presence of the elderly in the life of the Church. The author will therefore focus, first and foremost, on the view of old age as a time of thanksgiving and gratitude to God for the gift of life, for the goods received, the experiences lived, and the people encountered. Viewed from the perspective of faith, old age is also a time of preparation for death and for meeting the Risen Christ. It is therefore a time to adopt a new outlook on faith and the call to holiness. Old age is, at the same time, a period of life in which individuals can still contribute a lot to the life of the family, society, and the Church through their commitment, service, bearing witness to the faith, bearing witness to the Gospel and the values that flow from living the Gospel, through works of charity and, above all, through sharing the awareness that life is a beautiful gift from God that is worth using well and wisely. And, through the wisdom gained over the many years of their lives, elderly people become authentic witnesses of God’s love. The experience of long life and gratitude for this gift is not only relevant to Catholics and Christians, but has a universal appeal, since in any society, regardless of faith, human life should also be valued in old age. Full article

This essay examines the Holy Monday sermon by Boules George, a senior priest at St. Mark Church in Cairo, that was preached the day after the Palm Sunday suicide bomb attacks against St. George Coptic Orthodox Church in Tanta and St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Alexandria in Egypt in 2017, which left forty-four people dead and more than one hundred injured. The sermon addressed Coptic Orthodox Christians in Cairo as well as the wider Coptic Orthodox community in Egypt and throughout the world through a live video broadcast. The sermon is remarkable for presenting a radical call to nonviolence and Christian love. Notably, the preacher speaks to “those who are killing us”, and says “thank you” for the opportunity to die as Christ died, for “this is the greatest honor that we could have”. This essay analyzes the sermon in light of the work of Walter Brueggemann and Alexander Schmemann, and argues that the sermon is an example of daring speech that offers divine empowerment to the suffering and the fearful. Full article

The demographic changes taking place before our eyes regarding the structure of our society show that the proportion of older people is increasing quite rapidly. Very often these are people who want to be involved in the life of the family, society, and the Church, although their presence and involvement is not always viewed positively by the younger generations. On the other hand, the time of old age is a difficult time with many challenges, such as loss of health, and consequently the elderly need the support of the younger generations. This reality is also recognised by Pope Francis, and it could be said that the problem of the elderly is close to his heart. An expression of the importance and value of older people is, for example, his frequent meetings with older people, the establishment of a World Day for Grandparents and Older Persons, or the series of catechesis on old age and the value of this time in people’s lives delivered in 2022. Taking into account these aspects of social change and based on the totality of Pope Francis’ teachings addressed to the elderly, we wish to highlight distinctive elements emphasising the value of the elderly in the life of the family, society, and the Church. Starting from the presentation of the family as the best and natural environment for living during the time of old age, these teachings highlight older people as “guardians” of roots and values, the importance of intergenerational dialogue and a type of “covenant of generations”, and the importance of older people in the life of the Church. An important element of Francis’ teachings on old age is to identify this period as a “time of grace”, a time of looking at life from the perspective of the years and trying to take stock of it, and a time of thanksgiving. All of this is done to emphasise the importance and value of the time of old age and to see and appreciate their presence in the life of the family, society, and the Church. Full article

Yeasts have been a part of human life since ancient times in the fermentation of many natural products used for food. In addition, in the 20th century, they became powerful tools to elucidate the functions of eukaryotic cells as soon as the techniques of molecular biology developed. Our molecular understandings of metabolism, cellular transport, DNA repair, gene expression and regulation, and the cell division cycle have all been obtained through biochemistry and genetic analysis using different yeasts. In this review, we summarize the role that yeasts have had in biological discoveries, the use of yeasts as biological tools, as well as past and on-going research projects on HMGB proteins along the way from yeast to cancer. Full article

Demand prediction for postal delivery services is useful for managing logistic operations optimally. Particularly for holiday periods, namely the Lunar New Year and Korean Thanksgiving Day (Chuseok) in South Korea, the logistics service increases sharply compared with the usual period, which makes it hard to provide reliable operation in mail centers. This study proposes a Multilayer Perceptron-based weighted ensemble method for predicting the accepted parcel volumes during special periods. The proposed method consists of two main phases: the first phase enriches the training dataset via synthetic samples using unsupervised learning; the second phase builds two Multilayer Perceptron models using internal and external factor-derived features for prediction. The final result is estimated by the weighted average predictions of these models. We conducted experiments on 25 Korean mail center datasets. The experimental study on the dataset provided by Korea Post shows better performance than other compared methods. Full article

This essay considers Karl Barth’s conception of gratitude to God, and the significance of being grateful for one’s own life within his doctrine of creation. I argue that Barth’s account of gratitude authorizes an affirmation of one’s own life that avoids the trappings of the egoistic self-love that he vociferously opposed. Additionally, I consider whether and how Barth’s conception of gratitude for our lives demands cheerfulness, or whether it adequately leaves room for the type of sobriety and lament that Beethoven exemplifies in his “Holy Song of Thanksgiving of a Convalescent to the Deity.” Full article

Gratitude to God is a core component of Christian liturgy; along with the countless hymns which express attitudes of thanks to God, Christian liturgy often includes acts of spoken gratitude, as well as prayers of thanksgiving. We argue that two aspects of liturgical gratitude distinguish it from gratitude more generally. First, liturgical gratitude is always scripted, leading to the worry that those who express gratitude do so disingenuously. Secondly, liturgical gratitude is always social in some way, as our gratitude is drawn into the worship of the community of the Church. The paper provides an account of liturgical gratitude that explores these two key distinctive features. Full article

Today there are many occasions when persons from various religious traditions gather together for some type of observance. These gatherings are referred to by various names: Interfaith “Worship”, Multireligious “Prayer,” Interreligious “Services,” and “Integrative Religious Prayer.” People come together to learn more about one another, to protest injustices, to mourn disasters, and to join together to work for the common good. In some gatherings, there are also people in attendance who claim no religious affiliation at all. In other gatherings, like a community ritual event designed by the religious leaders of the town the eve before Thanksgiving, there is often an assumption that all who attend “pray” to a “God” even if the content and forms of “prayer” and the names and understandings of “God” differ. However, while Buddhists use the term “prayer,” they do not have a “god” to whom they pray. This article addresses the models of host/guest, serial interfaith occasions (when people are participant observers at a gathering where each religious tradition maintains its own integrity and contributes something to the whole in a serial fashion), and “inter-riting” (when the event is designed so the people can pray together in a unified fashion, often blurring the boundaries that commonly separate each religion). The Shinnyo Lantern Floating Hawaii, a large Buddhist-designed interfaith ritual gathering that combines the personal and the global, and offers insights into guest/host, serial interfaith, and inter-riting models, will be used as a basis for understanding these issues to assist religious leaders in their interfaith work. Full article

Prayer is one of the most important aspects of religious/spiritual life. The psychological literature has identified various types of prayer and a few methods for measuring it. The Multidimensional Prayer Inventory (MPI) has received much attention from researchers since it allows for the capture of the most universal forms of prayer, characteristic of the Judeo-Christian tradition: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication, and Reception. The aim of this article was to examine psychometric properties and clinical applications of the Polish MPI. In four studies, we established the internal structure of the MPI using Principal Component Analysis (PCA, study 1) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA, study 2), examined its validity and reliability in relation to religiousness (study 3), and analysed its clinical application (study 4). The Polish MPI has been confirmed as a reliable and valid measure of five types of prayer for use in research settings. Full article

It is the thesis of this article that a secular form of the biblical Exodus pattern is used by Woody Allen in his Broadway Danny Rose. In the history of the Bible, and its interpretation, the Exodus pattern is again and again used as a model for inspiration: from oppression to deliverance. It was an important source of both argument and symbolism during the American Revolution. It was used by the Boer nationalists fighting the British Empire and it comes to life in the hand of liberation theology in South America. The use of this pattern and its use during the seder meal is to be taken loosely here: Exodus is not a theory, but a story, a “Big Story” that became part of the cultural consciousness of the West and quite a few other parts of the world. Although the Exodus story is in the first place an account of deliverance or liberation in a religious context and framework, in Broadway Danny Rose it is used as a moral device about how to survive in the modern wilderness. Full article

This article stems from a conversation with Otsi’tsakén:ra Charlie Patton that took place on Mohawk/Kanien’kehá:ka territory in Southern Turtle Island (Also known as Quebec, Canada) Otsi: tsaken’ra is a Kanien’kehá:ka who teaches the importance of harvest and the inter-relational connection that human beings have with what they harvest. His teachings begin with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen (Also known as the Thanksgiving address, greetings, or opening prayer), an opening address, which invites all who partake to be “of one mind”. The Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen embodies the importance of storytelling, the Creation story, harvest teachings, and cultural continuity, which are all important teachings that are necessary for Onkwehónwe (The Original People) to begin healing from the effects of colonialism, cultural and linguistic disconnection, state-imposed violence, and racism. Full article

In this article, I propose a phenomenological analysis of the liturgy of Maundy Thursday, as it is celebrated in the contemporary Anglican Church of Canada. As an example of liturgy, Maundy Thursday is particularly generative for phenomenological description because of its affective range and drama. A participant in the liturgy is given the opportunity to experience a combination of grief, lament, remorse, joy, thanksgiving, kindness and compassion, care for the body, vulnerability and humility, as well as fear and confusion. Situated on the threshold between Lent and Easter, it is a richly complex moment in the liturgical year and combines, in a creative and affective tension, celebration with mourning, order with chaos, and love and service with betrayal and repentance. Full article

Large-scale population mobility has an important impact on the spatial layout of China’s urban systems. Compared with traditional census data, mobile-phone-based travel big data can describe the mobility patterns of a population in a timely, dynamic, complete, and accurate manner. With the travel big dataset supported by Tencent’s location big data, combined with social network analysis (SNA) and a semiparametric geographically weighted regression (SGWR) model, this paper first analyzed the spatiotemporal patterns and characteristics of mobile-data-based population mobility (MBPM), and then revealed the socioeconomic factors related to population mobility during the Spring Festival of 2019, which is the most important festival in China, equivalent to Thanksgiving Day in United States. During this period, the volume of population mobility exceeded 200 million, which became the largest time node of short-term population mobility in the world. The results showed that population mobility presents a spatial structure dominated by two east–west main axes formed by Chengdu, Nanjing, Wuhan, Shanghai; and three north–south main axes formed by Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Wuhan, and Chengdu. The major cities in the four urban agglomerations in China occupy an absolute core position in the population mobility network hierarchy, and the population mobility network presents typical “small world” features and forms 11 closely related groups. Semiparametric geographically weighted regression model results showed that mobile-data-based population mobility variation is significantly related to the value-added of secondary and tertiary industries, foreign capital, average wage, urbanization rate, and value-added of primary industries. When the spatial heterogeneity and nonstationarity was considered, the socioeconomic factors that affect population mobility showed differences between different regions and cities. The patterns of population mobility and determinants explored in this paper can provide a new reference for the balanced development of regional economy. Full article

The ‘Epic of Evolution’ is the scientific story that reveals that we live in an approximately 14-billion-year-old universe on a planet that is approximately 4.6 billion years old and that we are a part of the ongoing process of life that has existed on Earth for 3.5–4 billion years. This article focuses on the religious and ecological significance of the evolutionary epic in an effort to seamlessly connect the ecological value attributed as a part of an understanding of the evolutionary connectedness of life on earth with the Divine grace understood to be present in Christian sacramental worship. With a particular emphasis on the Eucharist, I argue that the sacramental perspective of grace being conveyed through material reality provides the potential for Christian sacramental tradition to make a significant contribution to protecting the threatened ecological communities of our planet. By incorporating William Temple’s concept of a ‘sacramental universe,’ I propose that the grace that is understood to be present in the substances of the bread and wine of the Eucharist points outward so that it can also be witnessed in all of God’s ongoing Creation. When the Eucharist is understood as taking place in a sacramental universe from which ecological grace flows; the incarnation can be recognized not as a one-time event but as an ongoing sacramental process through which God is revealed through the perpetual emergence of life. Consequently, as the primary form of sacramental worship in Christian tradition, the Eucharistic witness to the incarnation of God in Jesus and thanksgiving for life overcoming death provide Christians with a ritual orientation for recognizing the incarnational presence of God as an ever-present reality potentially witnessed in all that is. Therefore, the formal sacrament of the Eucharist is a part of a broader sacramental ecology of earthly life in which the presence of Divine grace can be witnessed in all aspects of the natural order. As a result, connecting Eucharistic grace with the value associated with an awareness of the ecological and genetic connectedness of all forms of life serves as a mutual enrichment of sacramental tradition and contemporary efforts to protect life on Earth. Full article