Group Employment Counseling Training in Canada

This article outlines the views of the author regarding group training of employment counselors in Canada. The current group training program for employment counselors and the accompanying packages are discussed.     

IS GOVERNMENT SUPEREROGATION POSSIBLE?

Governments are subject to the requirements of justice, yet often seem to go above and beyond what justice requires in order to act in ways many people think are good. These kinds of acts – examples of which include putting on celebrations, providing grants to poets, and preserving historic architecture – appear to be acts of government supererogation. In this paper, I argue that a common view about the relationship between government, coercion, and justice implies that most such acts are not supererogatory, but wrong. Many will find that conclusion unattractive, but rejecting the common view that implies it raises problems, too.     

Speculating about Divinity? God's Immanent Life and Actualistic Ontology

This article argues that counterfactual statements concerning God's life in himself are both theologically informative and genuinely warranted by Karl Barth's notion of God's 'being-in-act' as presented in § 28.1 of the Church Dogmatics. To this end, the proposed reading aims to mitigate recent emphases on divine Entscheidung as the primary category for construing Barth's theological ontology. Without offering a resolution to alleged 'tensions' in Barth's doctrine of God, the author nevertheless suggests that there are good reasons to prefer certain streams of Barth's thought to others, with the notion of God's love offered as a test case.     

Valuegenesis: A Megastudy of Faith Maturity and Its Relationship to Variables Within the Home,School, and Church

Concern with declining enrollment and commitment in Seventh-day Adventist schools in the United States and Canada led to one of the largest studies ever undertaken by any church group. The research involved nearly 11,000 sixth- through twelfth-grade youth and another 2,300 parents, teachers, and pastors. The findings both encouraged and challenged the Church and underscored the cumulative roles that homes, schools, and churches play in nurturing faith and loyalty among Christian youth.     

Just War Theory, the Authorization of the State, and the Hermeneutics of Peoplehood: How John Howard Yoder can save Oliver O'Donovan from himself

Abstract:  The different responses of Oliver O'Donovan and John Howard Yoder to the question of the political implications of the New Testament's proclamation of the lordship of Jesus Christ are reducible to their different analyses of how the cross defines the meaning of the mediatorial and representative roles which met in him. Furthermore, this difference grounds their very different responses to the question of what form the Christian counter-praxis of peace must take in the face of conflict. This article will argue that O'Donovan's authorization of secular authority to mediate God's judgements is the product of an ontology that rules out beforehand both the possibility that Jesus' death is decisive for understanding his mediatorial representation and, as a result, the possibility that the task set before the church is to model alternatives to the state based on its acquaintance with its own practices of reconciliation and discernment.     

RELEASING THE FEMININE VOICE: A CAVELLIAN EPISTEMOLOGY FOR THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

How can we imagine anew the discipline of philosophy of religion, given the feminist critiques that it privileges thinking driven by the needs of male subject formation? I address this question first by arguing with Cavell that a specific masculine aversion of erotic reciprocity produces a particular skeptical epistemology. Overcoming this phallocentric thinking requires therefore a new eros. Secondly, I will argue that the fluidly gendered subjectivities I detect in Cavell's work on film enable such a new erotic and epistemic orientation. I conclude by outlining the consequences of this orientation for the pursuits of philosophy of religion.     

Differences in relationship investments between gay and heterosexual men

Previous Investment Model research found that investments are a weaker predictor of relationship commitment for gay men compared with heterosexual men. The present study examined whether this effect is characteristic of investments in general or whether it is specific to certain types of investments. Results indicated that tangible investments significantly predicted commitment among heterosexual men, but not among gay men. In contrast, intangible investments predicted commitment regardless of sexual orientation. Furthermore, adding measures of tangible and intangible investments to the traditional Investment Model variables significantly increased explained variance in commitment for both gay and heterosexual men. These findings highlight the importance of reevaluating how relationship investments are conceptualized and suggests that not all investments are equally consequential across different romantic involvements.     

The Effects of Stress and Gender on Nonverbal Decoding Accuracy in Kinesic and Vocalic Channels

Stress has the potential to impair accurate decoding of others’ communication. This experiment tested the effects of stress, induced through the Stroop Color-Word Test, on the accurate decoding of kinesic and vocalic emotional expressions. Respondents (N =372) viewed or heard 30 emotional expressions interspersed with multichannel color stimuli that were redundant with one another (low stress) or conflicted with one another (high stress). Analyses of accuracy scores across three trials supported three of four hypotheses. Stress debilitated accuracy primarily in the vocalic channel and at the onset of stress. The kinesic facial channel also produced consistently higher accuracy than the vocalic channel, and females achieved higher accuracy than males, but this superiority dissipated by the third trial.