How is Christ Present to the World?*

Abstract: The issue of how Christ is present to the world covers many themes. Christ is the proper presence of God, made known to the world through the witnessing activity of the church. In this, the Holy Spirit plays an important role. Furthermore, in so far as it is God's intention to be present to the world in this way, we may see a link between the notions of God's presence in Christ, providence and sacramentality.     

Measuring Evangelicalism: Consequences of Different Operationalization Strategies

Several investigations of American evangelicalism have been conducted in recent decades, yet they conceptualize evangelicalism in different ways. It is not surprising, therefore, that different profiles of the evangelical movement and its adherents emerge from these studies. This research reviews major studies on the subject undertaken since 1976, when evangelicals first attracted national attention. Using data collected in a single data set—the 1998 General Social Survey—we show how measurement strategies employed in different studies yield drastically different pictures of evangelicalism. Conservative measures indicate that only one in 20 Americans is evangelical while one in two is evangelical according to a combination of more expansive measures. The demographic, cultural, and religious characteristics of evangelicals, as well as theories about them, hinge upon how the population is defined.     

Predicting Reaction to a Message of Ministry: An Audience Analysis

This study investigated whether audience characteristics identified as important in the conversion and religious recruitment literature could predict reaction to a Christianity-themed recruitment message. More specific goals involved (a) comparing the impact of potential recruits' dispositional attributes and personal motivations versus their situational availability on the persuasive effect of religious recruitment messages; and (b) rank ordering the audience characteristics examined based on their predictive power. Results indicated that dispositional and motivational considerations were more reliable predictors of receivers' responses to the recruitment message than were situational factors. Specifically, five of the six dispositional and motivational variables (i.e., loneliness, perceived childhood attachment history, meaning and purpose, other-orientation, and problem-solving perspective) were—at least under certain conditions—related to participants' interest in the church. The two variables representing situational availability, free time and membership status, however, were either unrelated to interest in the church or related to participants' reactions, but in the opposite direction of what was expected.     

Constructing intergroup relationships in social communication

Abstract:  People communicate with each other about their ingroup and outgroup in a social context. These social communications may have profound effects in constructing intergroup relationships. In this paper, we outline how different combinations of the social identities of the sender, receiver, and target of the social communication may give rise to differing face concerns of the ingroup and outgroup, and may result in different patterns of communications about them. People may enhance or protect their ingroup social identity, and derogate the outgroup social identity to their ingroup audiences; however, they are more likely to enhance and protect their outgroup's social identity when communicating with outgroup audiences. Two studies tested these predictions. Study 1 used real groups of Australian and Asian students communicating about an Asian student in an Australian university context. In Study 2, participants assigned to two fictitious groups communicated about their ingroup and outgroup. In both studies, the findings were interpreted within the framework of intergroup communication, although there were some notable deviations from the predictions. Future directions of the research were also discussed.     

THE LITERAL SENSE OF SCRIPTURE ACCORDING TO HENRI DE LUBAC: INSIGHTS FROM PATRISTIC EXEGESIS OF THE TRANSFIGURATION

This essay explicates Henri de Lubac's account of Scripture's literal sense as illumined by three patristic interpretations of the Transfiguration. Origen's exegesis highlights de Lubac's deployment of the Incarnational analogy in which history contains, veils, and discloses divine mystery. Similar to Jerome, de Lubac distinguishes the realities of biblical history (as revelatory loci) from their textual articulation. Augustine illustrates the hermeneutical influence of the interpreter's presupposed account of history, to which de Lubac, following Blondel, attributes great importance in approaching the biblical letter. De Lubac's account of the literal sense is thoroughly theological and an underexplored resource for thinking about this topic.     

LANGUAGE AND TRUTH IN HUA-YEN BUDDHISM

It has been observed in contemporary Buddhist studies that new and distinct ways of expressing Buddhist "ultimate truth" and its relation to ordinary truth and experience began to emerge in the Chinese Buddhist tradition in the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. During this period of Chinese history, several systems of Buddhist thought arose that seemed to mitigate the primacy of negative language in references to "ultimate truth" and the predominantly negative evaluation of conventional truth and experience that had dominated the tradition previously. This development has been noticed especially in the Sui/T'ang systems of Buddhist thought, T'ien-t'ai and Hua-yen, as well as in later Ch'an thought and practice.