1,721,133 research outputs found
Ministers and Ministerial Training
No full textProtestant Dissent was assailed by Anglo-Catholics in England and by the Mercersburg Theologians in the United States for its fissiparous tendencies, sectarian nature, and privileging of emotional conversionism over apostolic order and objective, sacramental religion. Yet this chapter argues that personal conversion was essential to the faith of Dissent and the key to its spirituality, worship, and congregational life. Whether conversion was gradual or instantaneous, it remained the point of entry into the Christian life and the full privileges of church membership. Spurred by the preaching of the gospel and sometimes, but not always, accompanied by the application of the divine law, the earlier underpinning of conversionism in Calvinism gave way to an emphasis on human response. Popular in both the United States and Great Britain, the ‘new measures’ of the Presbyterian evangelist Charles Finney, in which burdened souls were called forward to ‘the anxious bench’ and prayerfully incited to undergo the new birth, brought thousands into the churches. However, in more liberal circles especially, conversion had by the end of the century become less of a crisis of guilt and redemption than a smooth progression towards spiritual fullness. Although preaching was often linked, especially in the first part of the century, with revivalist exuberance, it remained a mainstay of congregational life. Mainly expository and practical with a view of building up congregants in the faith, it was accompanied by hymn singing, scriptural readings, public prayers, and the two sacraments or ‘ordinances’ of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Sermons tended to become shorter as the century progressed, from an hour or so to thirty or forty minutes, while the ‘long prayer’, invariably offered by the minister, tended to be didactic in tone. From mid-century onwards, there was a move towards more rounded worship, though congregations would sit (or sometimes stand) for prayer, but not kneel. The liturgical use of the church year with congregational recitation of the Lord’s Prayer became slowly more acceptable. Communion, either monthly or quarterly, was usually a Zwinglian memorial of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. The impact of the temperance movement during the latter part of the century dictated the use of non-alcoholic rather than fermented wine in the Lord’s Supper, while in a reaction to Anglican sacerdotalism, baptism too, whether believers’ baptism or paedo-baptism, progressively lost its sacramental character. Throughout the century, Dissenters sang. In the absence of an externally imposed prayer book or a standardized liturgy, hymns provided them with both devotional aids and a collective identity. Unaccompanied at first, hymn singing, inspired mostly by the muse of Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and, in Wales, William Williams, became more disciplined, eventually with organ accompaniment. Even while moving towards a more sophisticated, indeed bourgeois mode, Dissent maintained a vibrant congregational life which prized a simple, biblically based spirituality.</p
Unitarians and Presbyterians
No full textMethodism was originally a loosely connected network of religious clubs, each devoted to promoting holy living among its members. It was part of the Evangelical Revival, a movement of religious ideas which swept across the North Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. This chapter charts the growth and development, character and nature, and consolidation and decline of British Methodism in the nineteenth century from five distinct perspectives. First, Methodism grew rapidly in the early nineteenth century but struggled to channel that enthusiasm in an effective way. As a result, it was beset by repeated secessions, and the emergence of rival Methodist groups, each with their own distinctive characteristics, of which Wesleyan Methodism was the largest and most influential. Second, while Methodism grew rapidly in England, it struggled to find a successful footing in the Celtic fringes of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. Here, local preoccupations, sectarian tensions, and linguistic differences required a degree of flexibility which the Methodist leadership was often not prepared to concede. Third, the composition of the Methodist membership is considered. While it is acknowledged that most Methodists came from working-class backgrounds, it is also suggested that Methodists became more middle class as the century progressed. People were attracted to Methodism because of its potential to transform lives and support people in the process. It encouraged the laity to take leadership roles, including women. It provided a whole network of support services which, taken together, created a self-sufficient religious culture. Fourth, Methodism had a distinctive position within the British polity. In the early nineteenth century the Wesleyan leadership was deeply conservative, and even aligned itself with the Tory interest. Wesleyan members and almost all of Free Methodism were reformist in their politics and aligned themselves with the Whig, later Liberal interest. This early conservatism was the result of Methodism’s origins within the Church of England. As the nineteenth century progressed, this relationship came under strain. By the end of the century, Methodists had distanced themselves from Anglicans and were becoming vocal supporters of Dissenting campaigns for political equality. Fifth, in the late nineteenth century, Methodism’s spectacular growth of earlier decades had slowed and decline began to set in. From the 1880s, Methodism sought to tackle this challenge in a number of ways. It sought to broaden its evangelical message, and one of its core theological precepts, that of holiness. It embarked on an ambitious programme of social reform. And it attempted to modernize its denominational practices. In an attempt to strengthen its presence in the face of growing apathy, several branches of Methodism reunited, forming, in 1932, the Methodist Church in Britain. However, this institutional reorganization could not stop the steady decline of British members into the twentieth century. Instead, Methodism expanded globally, into previously non-Christian areas. It is now a denomination with a significant world presence. British Methodism, however, continues to struggle, increasingly of interest only as a heritage site for the origins of a much wider and increasingly diverse movement.</p
Potential controls on interannual partitioning of organic carbon during the winter/spring phytoplankton bloom at the Bermuda Atlantic time-series study (BATS) site
No full textSeasonal dissolved organic carbon (DOC) accumulation and potential subsequent export, in addition to particulate organic carbon (POC) gravitational export, can be an important pathway of carbon removal from the surface ocean (>100 m) at the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS). We have compiled available data on seasonal DOC accumulation and POC flux during the course of the winter/spring bloom and examined some potential controls on the interannual variability of organic carbon partitioning between these two fates. When expressed as a fraction of the cumulative primary production, there was a significant negative relationship between seasonal DOC accumulation and POC flux. Over the course of the BATS data record two groups of phytoplankton, Haptophytes and Prochlorophytes, account for ?60% of the integrated (0–140 m) chlorophyll biomass. Variability in the relative abundance of Haptophytes and Prochlorophytes was significantly correlated to the export of carbon, with increased relative abundance of Haptophytes correlated with higher seasonal accumulation of DOC and lower POC fluxes. Variability in the abundance of Haptophytes during the winter/spring period was found to correlate negatively with the winter North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index. This relationship suggests that Haptophytes are a more important component of the phytoplankton community when a negative NAO phase enhances winter/spring mixing in the Sargasso Sea. These findings support a recent hypothesis that the increased stratification in the North Atlantic due to global warming could favor the blooming of diatoms over Haptophytes
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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