Ecumenism as Encounter

This article is a personal testimony of the encounter between Orthodox and Anglican traditions in the 20th and the 21st centuries. It offers an overview of more than 40 years of experience in ecumenical work with Orthodox churches, beginning with an experience of Orthodoxy in Serbia in 1974 and a meeting with Fr Justin Popovi?. It continues with an account of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, which has enabled Anglicans to meet and worship with Orthodox. It concludes with a discussion of the ways in which these relationships matured after the fall of communism with the creation of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge as an example of shared theological education. The article also highlights how traditions from the East of spiritual fatherhood, the Jesus Prayer, and icons have become familiar parts of Anglican church life.     

Mission and reconciliation from a Christian-Muslim relations perspective

The encounter between Islam and Christianity in the mission field has created shocks that have left indelible scars across the ages. These two religions, which have never hidden their missionary intentions, have at times engaged in the struggle for supremacy on the religious chessboard, not hesitating to encroach on each other. This state of affairs has led to frustrations and conflicts between the two religious systems that the passage of time has not been able to erase. Various organizations have attempted to bring Christians and Muslims together, among these the Programme for Christian-Muslim Relations in Africa. Reconciliation is possible. Although the path to reconciliation is still long, one who has already travelled on it gives us signs of hope. Only God can clear the path to effective reconciliation. This, however, must be combined with a new understanding of mission in both religious systems as well as a commitment on the part of both to embark on a new dynamic.     

“Liturgy emerges from a wound”

Serious academic reflection and scholarship on the Fresh Expressions of Church (FXoC) movement in the United Kingdom is developing significantly, but there exists almost no such work in South Africa. What has been produced deals with scholars reflecting on their experiences of Fresh Expressions in the United Kingdom (Ian Nell and Rudolph Grobler, “An Exploration of Fresh Expressions as Missional Church: Some Practical-Theological Perspectives,” NGTT DEEL 55:3–4 (2017), 747–68). This is an unfortunate situation. While there has been a generous response by many churches, there has been little interest, by and large, from the Anglican Church of Southern Africa (ACSA). FXoC is, then, an under-researched entity in South Africa. This article, part of a larger study, seeks to ask questions about how liturgy might develop from below in a new ecclesial community of marginalized people.     

Ensemble coding of facial identity is not refined by experience: Evidence from other-race and inverted faces

The ability to recognize identity despite within-person variability in appearance is likely a face-specific skill and shaped by experience. Ensemble coding – the automatic extraction of the average of a stimulus array – has been proposed as a mechanism underlying face learning (allowing one to recognize novel instances of a newly learned face). We investigated whether ensemble encoding, like face learning and recognition, is refined by experience by testing participants with upright own-race faces and two categories of faces with which they lacked experience: other-race faces (Experiment 1) and inverted faces (Experiment 2). Participants viewed four images of an unfamiliar identity and then were asked whether a test image of that same identity had been in the study array. Each test image was a matching exemplar (from the array), matching average (the average of the images in the array), non-matching exemplar (a novel image of the same identity), or non-matching average (an average of four different images of the same identity). Adults showed comparable ensemble coding for all three categories (i.e., reported that matching averages had been present more than non-matching averages), providing evidence that this early stage of face learning is not shaped by face-specific experience.     

Toward a More Credible Understanding of Post-Traumatic Growth

Traditional research on post-traumatic growth has utilized methodologically flawed cross-sectional designs that involve retrospective assessments of post-traumatic growth. This has resulted in a majority of research in this field suffering from a lack of credibility and reliability. In this special issue, we present nine articles that seek to make innovative conceptual and methodological contributions with the goal of promoting better research practices on post-traumatic growth. In the introduction to this special issue, we provide an overview of these contributions, and discuss the implications of these articles both to improving future scholarship and to encouraging personality scientists to examine this important phenomenon in the years and decades to come.     

Psychosis,symbol, affectivity 1: etiopathogenesis and treatment through analytical psychology

This is the first of two papers concerning our study into an integrated approach to psychotic disorders, conducted at the University of Palermo’s Psychiatry Unit Polyclinic over approximately 15 years. Here we will explore and reflect upon the acute psychotic condition mainly from a theoretical and conceptual perspective, while in the second paper we will explore the clinical perspective. From the point of view of psychopathology, and in the light of C.G. Jung’s conceptualization of analytical psychology, as well as calling on contributions from other authors from the systemic-relational and post-psychoanalytic field, we will clarify the ideas developed over these last few years by our team. From a more speculative perspective we will advance new interpretive hypotheses in an attempt to thoroughly understand the nature of the psychotic condition, both on a psychodynamic relational and a neuroscientific level. The paper describes how we revised our understanding of psychosis from a brain disease to a process aimed at the rearrangement of psychic functioning, as anticipated by John Weir Perry nearly 40 years ago.     

Modeling Asymmetry in the Time–Distance Relation of Ordinal Personality Items

In analyzing responses and response times to personality questionnaire items, models have been proposed which include the so-called “inverted-U effect.” These models predict that response times to personality test items decrease as the latent trait value of a given person gets closer to the attractiveness of an item. Initial studies into these models have focused on dichotomous personality items, and more recently, models for Likert-type scale items have been proposed. In all these models, it is assumed that the inverted-U effect is symmetrical around 0, while, as will be explained in this article, there are substantive and statistical reasons to study this assumption. Therefore, in this article, a general inverted-U model is proposed which accommodates two sources of asymmetry between the response times and the attractiveness of the items. The viability of this model is demonstrated in a simulation study, and the model is applied to the responses and response times of the Temperament and Character Inventory–Revised, covering a broad range of personality dimensions.     

Doing history that matters: Going public and activating voices as a form of historical activism

For many of us academics, doing community‐engaged research means coming to terms with the significant gaps in experience, privilege, and power, and overall access to knowledge. We are trained to learn through texts, not through direct experience. In some ways, we are even conditioned to tune out experience, or anecdote, to dilute personal subjectivities in favor of a critical analysis informed by a combination of methods and sources, and a reliance on text‐based forms of evidence. Whereas for most community members, evidence is experiential. This dynamic also underscores the tremendous power and responsibility we have as historians to shape identities and legacies through the stories we tell. In the end, I believe the risks are worth the rewards.     

General vs health‐specific consideration of immediate and future consequences to explain eating and exercise behavior in a Norwegian student population: A randomized survey experiment

Over several decades, the consideration of future consequences (CFC) construct has been used to explain and predict health behaviors. However, the reported associations between CFC and health behaviors are relatively weak, leading to the low explanatory power of the models. Recent research suggests that CFC can be a domain‐specific construct. In this study, we explored the psychometric properties of the Norwegian CFC‐general and CFC‐health questionnaires in terms of factor structure and discriminant and convergent validity and tested the association between the general and domain‐specific CFC and exercise and eating behaviors. In a randomized survey experiment, 1,001 university students were assigned to either a CFC‐general or a CFC‐health questionnaire. In the tested models, two dimensions of CFC, consideration of immediate consequences (CFC‐I) and consideration of future consequences (CFC‐F), were independent variables. The exercise and eating behaviors, measured both as self‐evaluated behaviors and self‐reported frequency measures, were dependent variables. The results showed that in both CFC‐general and CFC‐health, CFC‐I and CFC‐F are distinct dimensions that differentially explain variance in health behaviors. A domain‐specific CFC‐health explained a significantly higher amount of variance in self‐reported eating and exercising behaviors than a general CFC. Self‐evaluated health behaviors were better explained by CFC than self‐reported behavioral frequencies. Practical implications of the findings and avenues for future research are discussed.