Let Us Pray: Classroom Worship in Theological Education

Theological education typically includes classroom worship, a practice of great pedagogical power and curricular import. As pedagogy, classroom worship does four things. It focuses teaching and learning on God, and fosters theological dispositions necessary for sustaining that attention. Second, it rightly positions the entire class in dialogical relation to the divine Thou, in communal relation to each other, the larger church and the wider world, and in personal relations that risk transformation. Third, it frames theological education as an integrative practice of faith and learning. Finally, it invites teachers to know their students as whole persons and students to trust their teachers as spiritual guides. As curriculum, classroom worship may have greater significance than chapel worship for many students and at particular schools. It should be moved from implicit curriculum to explicit, with careful attention to the null curriculum and to the matrices of relationship within which worship has meaning.     

Schleiermacher and the Ethics of Authenticity

Schleiermacher's Soliloquies not only represent a pivotal work in this classically modern theologian's development as a moral philosopher. They are also arguably the principal moral writing of the early German romantic movement and therefore a significant, if widely overlooked, contribution to the history of ethics in the West. This essay provides a comprehensive interpretation and modest retrieval of this unusual and difficult work by bringing Schleiermacher's early “ethics of individuality” into conversation with Charles Taylor's conception of “expressivist” understandings of human selfhood. It argues that the Monologen are a signal instance of what Taylor has subtly characterized as romanticism's expressivist impulse.     

Interactive Effects of Chronic Health Conditions And Financial Hardship On Episodic Memory Among Older Blacks: Findings From The Health And Retirement Study

Previous research links chronic health conditions and financial hardship to cognitive outcomes among older Blacks. However, few studies have explored the moderating effect of financial hardship on chronic disease burden and specific cognitive domains. This study examined whether financial hardship (as measured by difficulty paying monthly bills) modifies the impact of self-reported chronic health conditions (e.g., diabetes, stroke) on episodic memory among 871 older Blacks (50+ years) in the 2006 Health and Retirement Study . Financial hardship modified the association between chronic disease burden and episodic memory performance such that individuals who reported very little difficulty paying their monthly bills had significantly lower memory scores at high levels of disease burden compared to those reporting high financial difficulty after controlling for age, gender and education (F 2, 49 = 5.03, p = .010). This cross-sectional study suggests that both financial and physical wellbeing may have joint effects on cognitive health in older Blacks.     

Idea‐Generation in Naturally Occurring Contexts

This study examined naturally occurring idea‐generation in organizational groups completing an extended problem‐solving task. Meetings held by 11 groups engaged in a quality improvement process in a governmental agency were analyzed to identify 37 idea‐generation episodes. All groups had available a group decision support system (GDSS), although some opted not to use it. Across all groups, idea productivity was low though fairly efficient, but GDSS‐supported idea‐generation produced significantly fewer ideas. In general, idea‐generation as a process appears to be more complex than has been thought; observed deviations from idealized idea‐generation norms were not necessarily dysfunctional. The findings encourage reassessment of the assumptions underlying existing normative models of idea‐generation.