Toccoa Falls College

This study elucidates Luke’s analytical strategies for writing history in the book of Acts through comparison with the Roman historian Sallust, focusing on how both authors construct narratives of leadership. Although Sallust and Luke are rarely compared in New Testament scholarship due to conventional boundaries such as language, religion, and historical context, both authors deploy similar interpretive practices drawn from the broader milieu of Greco-Roman historiography. Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae presents Cicero as an ineffective leader who, despite suppressing Catiline’s conspiracy in 63 BCE, could not save Rome from moral decline. Conversely, Luke in the book of Acts, particularly in the Miletus Speech (Acts 20:17–38), depicts Paul as a leader whose tireless pastoral oversight caused the rise of Gentile Christianity across the Roman Empire. This comparative study reveals that Luke, like Sallust, shapes the past not merely by reporting events but by analyzing their significance through interpretive frameworks of leadership.

In this article, I argue that what has been called 'the liturgical present' in recent philosophical discussions of Christian liturgy points to three different phenomena: (1) the phenomenological immersion into the narrative of the gospel by the use of present-tense language; (2) the actualisation of occurrent divine activity in the enactment of sacraments; and (3) the presence of the eternality of divine activity by means of the liturgical service's participation in heavenly worship. I clarify the philosophical and theological commitments involved in each of these three articulations of what happens when temporal presence is invoked in liturgical scripts. I conclude by arguing for a 'thick' account of the liturgical present in which each of these three phenomena offers the liturgical participant the kairological time of opportunity that disrupts mundane chronological experience.

Collocation analysis is a widespread method in corpus linguistics. A key metric used for collocation discovery is pointwise mutual information (PMI), determined by how frequently a collocation occurs relative to its expected frequency under the assumption of independence. However, PMI suffers from several limitations, especially its well-known bias for collocations involving low-frequency words. In this paper, we propose a method to determine the significance of the PMI statistic by calculating its p-value, following two probability models for collocations involving the binomial distribution and the Poisson distribution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method by investigating collocations involving the Greek word theta epsilon & oacute;& varsigma; , 'god', in ancient historiography. This example illustrates that the PMI statistic alone does not reveal the significance of a collocation, but rather that p-values provide a consistent threshold of statistical significance and thereby overcome many of the well-known limitations of PMI.

Open Hands is a six-week voluntary program that aims to increase financial literacy among Christian college juniors and seniors. This study, conducted at two Christian institutions of higher education in the Midwest and Southeast United States, tested the efficacy of the Open Hands finance program. Using a randomized subject, pretest-posttest control group design, the researchers measured the effect of the Open Hands finance program on the posttest scores of the experimental group compared to the control group while controlling for pretest scores. An ANCOVA was used to analyze the results from the 89 participants' tests. The independent variable of the Open Hands program was significant (F = 6.073, p = .016), with the average participant in the experimental group increasing their score on the 13-question test by 2.19 correct answers. Additionally, in the pretest phase, business majors were found to have significantly higher financial literacy than psychology majors, and the academic major category did not have a significant impact on posttest scores. The significant increase in posttest scores among the experimental group shows the potential benefit Open Hands can have for Christian college students. The true randomized design for this experiment along with the size and scope of the experiment suggests a reliable outcome for Christian college administrators should they administer the Open Hands program in a similar setting.

This article exposits Dietrich Bonhoeffer's account of participation as it appears in the theology of Ethics to clarify the extent to which his ontology of participation resembles or diverges from other participatory ontologies. In particular, this article argues for the centrality of the role of the will in Bonhoeffer's concept of participation in the reality of God in Christ. His language of participation is thus an expression of his voluntarism, which is ultimately a commitment to the claim that the human will in relation to God's reality and will is central to both justification and a Christian ethics. Because the relation between God and humanity is grounded in the event of justification, which is an encounter between wills, participation in Christ also takes the form of a relation between the human and divine will. This account is sufficient to distinguish it from alternative ontologies of participation.