Coping with Pastoral Burnout Using Christian Contemplative Practices

Three Christian Devotion Meditation (CDM) practices—lectio divina, centering prayer, and the examen—will be offered to aid in coping with ministerial stress and to prevent burnout. CDM or Christian contemplative practices are uniquely suited to develop the emotional resources pastors need for coping with burnout. The office of the pastor faces pressures which can cause burnout and threaten their ministries and personal relationships. The experience of pastoral burnout consists of acedia. Pastors experience spiritual emptiness due to two unique aspects of pastoral life. First, because pastors often work alongside with their families in the church while simultaneously serving their congregants, they experience inter-role conflict due to the high level of boundary ambiguity between their vocational and family lives. Second, pastors need to rely on their psychological resources to provide for their church members due to the emotional labor required of their positions. Consequently, pastors must rely on emotional labor strategies to respond positively to their congregations, which in turn can lead to emotional exhaustion.

Boundary negotiations: a paradox theoretical approach for efficient and flexible modular systems

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the interplay between firm boundary decisions and the management of both efficiency and flexibility and the implications this has for modular design in the provision of advanced services.Design/methodology/approachA single case study in the defence industry employs semi-structured interviews supplemented by secondary data. Data are analysed using thematic analysis.FindingsThe findings provide a process model of boundary negotiations for the design of efficient and flexible modular systems consisting of three phases; boundary ambiguity, boundary defences and boundary alignment.Practical implicationsThe study provides a process framework for boundary negotiations to help organisations navigate the management of both-and efficiency and flexibility in the provision of advanced services.Originality/valueDrawing upon modularity, paradox and systems theory, this article provides novel theoretical insight into the relationship between firm boundary decisions and the management of both-and efficiency vs. flexibility in the provision of product upgrade services.

Traumatized Syrian Refugees with Ambiguous Loss: Predictors of Mental Distress

Refugees from war zones often have missing significant others. A loss without confirmation is described as an ambiguous loss. This physical absence with simultaneous mental persistence can be accompanied by economic, social or legal problems, boundary ambiguity (i.e., uncertainty about who belongs to the family system), and can have a negative impact on mental health. The aim of this study was to identify sociodemographic and loss-related predictors for prolonged grief, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and somatization in treatment-seeking Syrian refugees with post-traumatic stress symptoms in Germany experiencing ambiguous loss. For the present study, data were based on the treatment-seeking baseline sample of the “Sanadak” randomized-controlled trial, analyzing a subsample of 47 Syrian refugees with post-traumatic stress symptoms in Germany experiencing ambiguous loss. Sociodemographic and loss-related questions were applied, along with standardized instruments for symptoms of prolonged grief (ICG), anxiety (GAD-7), depression (PHQ-9), PTSD (PDS-5) and somatization (PHQ-15). Linear regression models were used to predict mental health outcomes. Having lost a close family member and higher boundary ambiguity showed a statistically significant association with higher severity in prolonged grief. The overall model for somatization reached statistical significance, while no predictor independently did. Boundary ambiguity showed a statistically significant positive association with depression, while the overall model showed no statistically significant associations. Boundary ambiguity and missing family members seemed to be important predictors for prolonged grief. These findings support the importance of reunification programs and suggest an inclusion of the topic into psychosocial support structures, e.g., including psychoeducational elements on boundary ambiguity in support groups for traumatized individuals and families experiencing ambiguous loss. Further research is needed for a more detailed understanding of the impact of ambiguous loss on refugee populations.

Lexical Variability in French Translations of The Tale of Igor’s Campaign

In this article we consider the lexical variability of the French translations of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”. The research material includes the following lexical classes: color designations, flora and fauna names, as well as warfare terms. Lexical units are selected manually and processed with the help of a self-compiled parallel corpus of translated texts. A distinctive feature of the monument’s translations into foreign languages is the absence of the original text, which leads to a situation of multiple “original” texts. We have analyzed 11 texts of French translations of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” (some of the translations considered were unknown in Russian scientific practice), as well as the original Russian texts used by the translators (in case they were presented as parallel texts or mentioned in paratexts). We are faced with the situation of translation multiplicity, an actual area of research in modern translation studies, so we also considered the problem of multiplicity of original texts. The study revealed more than 30 occurrences of color designations lexemes, 99 uses of animal and plant names, as well as more than 100 occurrences of military lexical units. The features of translations of each lexical class were considered separately and the results of the analysis were compared. A number of reasons for lexical variability have been identified: differences in the original texts (reconstructions and translations into modern Russian), the abundance of “dark places” in the text of the monument (word boundary ambiguity in different reconstructions or lexemes that do not have a clear interpretation in modern Russian), different times of publication of the translation (during the period between 1823 and 2005), individual interpretations of the source text. A question about the correspondence of the translation devices used in recent translations of the “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” to the universal features of translation proposed by M. Baker, A. Berman and U. Eco has been raised. Most of them are applicable to the French translations of the famous epic. However, in some cases less common correlations have been found (meaning discrepancy, metonymic synonym, etc.).

Single depth map super-resolution via a deep feedback network

Existing depth map-based super-resolution (SR) methods cannot achieve satisfactory results in depth map detail restoration. For example, boundaries of the depth map are always difficult to reconstruct effectively from the low-resolution (LR) guided depth map particularly at big magnification factors. In this paper, we present a novel super-resolution method for single depth map by introducing a deep feedback network (DFN), which can effectively enhance the feature representations at depth boundaries that utilize iterative up-sampling and down-sampling operations, building a deep feedback mechanism by projecting high-resolution (HR) representations to low-resolution spatial domain and then back-projecting to high-resolution spatial domain. The deep feedback (DF) block imitates the process of image degradation and reconstruction iteratively. The rich intermediate high-resolution features effectively tackle the problem of depth boundary ambiguity in depth map super-resolution. Extensive experimental results on the benchmark datasets show that our proposed DFN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Band-Aids and Kisses Can’t Fix It: Mothers’ and Daughters’ Perceptions of Non-Death Loss and Boundary Ambiguity

The goal of this study was to explore middle aged mothers’ and young adult daughters’ perceptions of the impact of non-death loss. This qualitative study explored perceptions of loss and boundary ambiguity of 24 mother-daughter dyads through individual interviews. All mothers and daughters described losses such as illness, the daughters’ launching, and dissolution of relationships that impacted the mother-daughter relationship. Comparison of mothers’ and daughters’ descriptions of the impacts of loss revealed convergence and divergence in their descriptions of associated levels of boundary ambiguity. Although experiences of loss do seem to be a universal human experience, perceptions regarding the impact of loss on both the individual and the mother-daughter dyad vary greatly.

Women and Their Mothers-in-Law: Triangles, Ambiguity, and Relationship Quality

Each marriage is the beginning of multiple intergenerational in-law relationships. Drawing on a survey of 351 women about their relationships with their mothers-in-law (MILs), this article reports on the impact of family triangles and boundary ambiguity on the quality of the relationship. In a three-block regression analysis, predicting a seven-item relationship quality scale, the first block included six demographic variables. The second and third blocks included three survey items each of reported relationship triangles and boundary ambiguity in a woman’s interactions with her MIL. Results revealed that although the couple having children predicted worse relationship quality in the demographic block, that result was no longer significant once family triangle measures were entered. All three measures of boundary ambiguity were also significant. The three measures of boundary ambiguity eclipsed two of the three family triangles when entered in the third block, leaving only the daughter-in-law feeling comfortable going directly to the MIL about important issues still significant.

Lexical Access in the Processing of Word Boundary Ambiguity

Language ambiguity results from, among other things, the vagueness of the syntactic structure of phrases and whole sentences. Numerous types of syntactic ambiguity are associated with the placement of the phrase boundary. A special case of the segmentation problem is the phenomenon of word boundary ambiguities; in spoken natural language words coalesce, making it possible to interpret them in different ways (e.g., a name vs. an aim). The purpose of the study was to verify whether the two meanings of words with boundary ambiguities are activated, or whether it is a case of semantic context priming. The study was carried out using the cross-modality semantic priming paradigm. Sentences containing phrases with word boundary ambiguities were presented in an auditory manner to the participants. Immediately after, they performed a visual lexical decision task. Results indicate that both meanings of the ambiguity are automatically activated — independently of the semantic context. When discussing the results I refer to the autonomous and interactive models of parsing, and show other possible areas of research concerning word boundary ambiguities.