Breaking Depression’s Silence within the Church through Friendships

This article explores the silent nature of depression in the local church and suggests that developing Jesus-style friendships can break the silence. It adapts the author’s Doctor of Ministry (DMin) research project, which explored the silent nature of depression in the local church and Christianity’s interpretive healing qualities. This article argues that the church has a rich history of helping sufferers interpret their experiences of depression, but changing worldviews, the growth of the modern medical model, and the effectiveness of pharmaceuticals monopolized health and shoved the church to the periphery of the conversation. Silence became the church’s typical response, which promoted an attitude of stigma and avoidance. The article suggests that developing Jesus-style friendships can help break the silence because social or religious barriers do not restrict such friendships. This model of friendship is crucial for giving depression sufferers a sense of identity, meaning, and purpose within the church community.

From national panegyrics to stage scandal: Athanasios Diakos in history

On 26 March 1894 a panegyric titled ‘Athanasios Diakos in history’ was delivered at the Society of the Friends of the People. At the dusk of the nineteenth century, this speech summarized the literary programme of a nationalizing attachment to the heroes of 1821 and their romantic monumentalization. More than a century later, the theatrical scandal of Lena Kitsopoulou’s Athanasios Diakos: The Return (Greek Festival, Athens, 2012) was a typical response to the breach inflicted on the canonical meanings and the established interpretations of the myth of Diakos. Amid a national crisis, the transformation of Diakos into a modern-day kebabhouse owner who harasses his wife and his immigrant employee performed a critical transposition of the hero into a toxic unheroic present. After reviewing the histories and mythologies of Athanasios Diakos, this article discusses Kitsopoulou’s production and its reception in order to argue that the playwright called upon a dramaturgy of suspicion that threatened the credibility of a heroic past, destabilizing thereby national expectations and assumptions.

Apology responses and gender differences in spoken British English

This study presents a corpus-based sociopragmatic investigation into apology responses (ARs) and gender differences in ARs in spoken British English. Using data taken from the recently released Spoken BNC2014, the investigation leads to an adjusted taxonomy of ARs which comprises five categories and several sub-categories. The investigation shows that ‘Lack of response’ is the most typical response, followed by ‘Acceptance’, ‘Rejection’, ‘Evasion’, and ‘Acknowledgement’. The results are discussed in relation to the process of attenuation that apologies have undergone (e.g. Jucker 2019), i.e. apologies are becoming more routinised and less meaningful. The proposed taxonomy is subsequently used to examine the extent to which male and female recipients respond to apologies differently. While the investigation suggests no significant differences in ARs across genders, it has been observed that there is some correlation between ARs and the gender of the apologiser. Finally, the implications and applications of the study are briefly discussed.

Building crisis capacity with data breaches: the role of stakeholder relationship management and strategic communication

PurposeData security breaches are an increasingly common and costly problem for organizations, yet there are critical gaps in our understanding of the role of stakeholder relationship management and crisis communication in relation to data breaches. In fact, though there have been some studies focusing on data breaches, little is known about what might constitute a “typical” response to data breaches whether those responses are effective at maintaining the stakeholders' relationship with the organization, their commitment to use the organization after the crisis, or the reputational threat of the crisis. Further, even less is known about the factors most influencing response and outcome evaluation during data breaches.Design/methodology/approachWe identify a “typical” response strategy to data breaches and then evaluate the role of this response in comparison to situation, stakeholder demographics and relationships between stakeholders, the issue and the organization using an experimental design. This experiment focuses on a 2 (type of organization) × 2 (prior knowledge of breach risk) with a control group design.FindingsFindings suggest that rather than employing reactive crisis response messaging the role of public relations should focus on proactive relationship building between organizations and key stakeholders.Originality/valueFor the last several decades much of the field of crisis communication has assumed that in the context of a crisis the response strategy itself would materially help the organization. These data suggest that the field crisis communication may have been making the wrong assumption. In fact, these data suggest that reactive crisis response has little-to-no effect once we consider the relationships between organizations, the issue and stakeholders. The findings show that an ongoing program of crisis capacity building is to an organization's strategic advantage when data security breaches occur.

Maternal cannibalism in two populations of wild chimpanzees

Maternal cannibalism has been reported in several animal taxa, prompting speculations that the behavior may be part of an evolved strategy. In chimpanzees, however, maternal cannibalism has been conspicuously absent, despite high levels of infant mortality and reports of non-maternal cannibalism. The typical response of chimpanzee mothers is to abandon their deceased infant, sometimes after prolonged periods of carrying and grooming the corpse. Here, we report two anomalous observations of maternal cannibalism in communities of wild chimpanzees in Uganda and Ivory Coast and discuss the evolutionary implications. Both infants likely died under different circumstances; one apparently as a result of premature birth, the other possibly as a result of infanticide. In both cases, the mothers consumed parts of the corpse and participated in meat sharing with other group members. Neither female presented any apparent signs of ill health before or after the events. We concluded that, in both cases, cannibalizing the infant was unlikely due to health-related issues by the mothers. We discuss these observations against a background of chimpanzee mothers consistently refraining from maternal cannibalism, despite ample opportunities and nutritional advantages. We conclude that maternal cannibalism is extremely rare in this primate, likely due to early and strong mother–offspring bond formation, which may have been profoundly disrupted in the current cases.

Prologue

Whenever people found out I was writing a book on Mormons and musicals, the typical response was a skeptical, “Well, I know one.” To be fair, the Broadway hit Book of Mormon is nearly unavoidable and has really upped the ante in terms of Mormon representation in popular culture. Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone brought a queer version of Mormonism to the stage in 2011 and largely, I think, showed Mormons a version of themselves they found unbelievable yet showed non-Mormons a version of Mormonism that instinctively felt true and real. Where you fall within these two camps probably has less to do with the kind of Mormon history you know and more to do with how much you are aware of just how entwined Mormon ideologies and musical theater really are. Mormons and musicals (and Mormons ...

Defining discourse formulae: computational approach

In this paper, we address the problem of automatic extraction of discourse formulae. By discourse formulae (DF) we mean a special type of constructions at the discourse level, which have a fixed form and serve as a typical response in the dialogue. Unlike traditional constructions [4, 5, 6], they do not contain variables within the sequence; their slots can be found in the left-hand or right-hand statements of the speech act. We have developed the system that extracts DF from drama texts. We have compared token-based and clause- based approaches and found the latter performing better. The clause-based model involves a uniform weight vote of four classifiers and currently shows the precision of 0.30 and the recall of 0.73 (F1-score 0.42).The created module was used to extract a list of DF from 420 drama texts of XIX-XXI centuries [1, 7]. The final list contains 3000 DF, 1800 of which are unique. Further development of the project includes enhancing the module by extracting left context features and applying other models, as well as exploring what DF concept looks like in other languages.

Towards a Principled Legal Response to Children Who Kill

This article surveys common-law jurisdictions, finding that the typical response to a homicide charge against a child is prosecution and sentencing in the adult jurisdiction. Reforms, such as alterations to trial procedure, and lower sentencing starting points have focussed on mitigating the excesses of adult trial and sentence. A principled approach requires a different lens. Practical strands of an age-appropriate response include custody as a last resort and only where there is a risk to public safety, an automatic prohibition on publication of identifying biographical details, and a child-specific jurisdiction. The prevailing societal interest is in reintegration.

Supporting Evolution by Responding to “Missing Link” Arguments

The missing link argument is a common challenge raised by students to evolutionary theory; it notes that the majority of evolutionary transitions are not represented in the fossil record. A typical response is to present examples of fossils that have a combination of ancestral and derived traits, but I argue that this approach is largely ineffective because it does not address the broader question of whether the fossil record accords better with evolutionary theory than with creationist narratives. A better response is to agree that the fossil record is largely incomplete because fossilization is rare, and to direct the conversation toward addressing how a rich, yet incomplete, collection of evidence can be reasonably interpreted. Evolutionary theory and creationism pose starkly different expectations about trends in fossil diversity, and evolution is strongly supported while creationism is not.