Merit in the Midst of Grace: The Covenant with Adam Reconsidered in View of the Two Powers of God

Abstract:  The position of Barth and others, that the covenant with Adam is thoroughly legalistic, is based on the incorrect assumption that grace and works cannot coexist as covenant principles. However, the difficulty of seeing the harmony between these principles is real. This article reconsiders the covenant with Adam in light of the medieval concept of the two powers of God, or as we shall argue here, the two perspectives on God's power. These two perspectives, part of the original intellectual milieu in which covenant theology arose, demonstrate that the divine covenant with humanity may include aspects of both God's grace and human merit simultaneously. God's grace is apparent de potentia absoluta , from the perspective of God's absolute power, and God's justice and the possibility of Adam's merit are apparent de potentia ordinata , from the perspective of God's ordained power. Both perspectives, what God could do and what he has in fact chosen to do, are valid and necessary perspectives for understanding God's covenant dealings.     

Spoken word recognition by eye

Spoken word recognition is thought to be achieved via competition in the mental lexicon between perceptually similar word forms. A review of the development and initial behavioral validations of computational models of visual spoken word recognition is presented, followed by a report of new empirical evidence. Specifically, a replication and extension of Mattys, Bernstein & Auer's (2002) study was conducted with 20 deaf participants who varied widely in speechreading ability. Participants visually identified isolated spoken words. Accuracy of visual spoken word recognition was influenced by the number of visually similar words in the lexicon and by the frequency of occurrence of the stimulus words. The results are consistent with the common view held within auditory word recognition that this task is accomplished via a process of activation and competition in which frequently occurring units are favored. Finally, future directions for visual spoken word recognition are discussed.     

LITURGICALLY TRAINED MEMORY: A READING OF SUMMA THEOLOGIAE III.83

Drawing on Ciceronian rhetorical tropes, Thomas Aquinas treats the rite of the Eucharist in terms of the classical ars memoriae. The Eucharist, for Aquinas, is the schooling in desire whereby we are trained to order the associations of our memory to their proper objects in terms of their relations to God. He thus conceives of the liturgy of the Mass as rhetoric proper, which truly teaches, moves and delights. Since memory is the condition of all thought, as both Thomas and Augustine claim, the Eucharist is the “site” of all theological production, and therefore the liturgy is the art of memory of which all other similar arts are derivative.     

The supermom trap: Do involved dads erode moms' self‐competence?

Increasingly, husbands have been expected to share equally in the task of childrearing, especially when their wives are employed. This study examined reactions to these changes in a sample of 78 dual-earner couples with 8-month-old infants. When wives felt that their husbands were skillful caregivers, greater husbands' contribution to caregiving was associated with lower self-competence among wives. In contrast, wives' caregiving behavior was unrelated to their husbands' self-competence. None of these effects emerged for the self-liking component of self-esteem. Thus, despite increasingly egalitarian sex roles, employed mothers (but not their husbands) seem to be trapped between their desire for help with childrearing and the threat to their personal competence posed by failure to meet socially constructed ideals of motherhood.     

A similarity-based smoothing approach to nondimensional item analysis

The probability that an examinee chooses a particular option within an item is estimated by averaging over the responses to that item of examinees with similar response patterns for the whole test. The approach does not presume any latent variable structure or any dimensionality. But simulated and actual data analyses are presented to show that when the responses are determined by a latent ability variable, this similarity-based smoothing procedure can reveal the dimensionality of ability very satisfactorily.The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada through grant A320, and to thank Educational Testing Service for making the data on the Advanced Placement Chemistry Exam available.