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Suffering with Christ: Emic christian coping and relation to well-being

Current measures of religious coping are generally etic in nature, measuring constructs across religions. Emic variables (i.e., those specific to particular religions) are often left out, which limits our ability to assess religious/spiritual coping during times of stress and adversity. Here we provide findings from three studies we conducted to develop and test an emic Christian meaning-making coping method: identifying with Christ in his suffering. We ground this construct in Christian theology, the psychology of religious/spiritual coping literature, and existing qualitative research. In the first study, we developed items and tested the items for clarity and generalizability to diverse Christian groups using expert review and cognitive interviewing with participants from five distinct Christian groups. In the second study, we conducted exploratory factor analysis using data from MTurk (N ​= ​335), which revealed a two-factor structure consistent with our theoretical formulation. In the third study, we established factor stability and construct validity using data from Prolific (N ​= ​355). Because we conceptualize identification with Christ in his suffering as a form of meaning-making coping, in this third study we also explored the relationship of the measure to well-being using incremental validity analyses. We found that identification with Christ in suffering predicted measures of well-being above and beyond the variance explained by etic religious coping measures. Collectively, these results highlight the value of emic religious measures of coping with suffering.

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Clement and Scriptural Exegesis

Abstract How might one describe early Christian exegesis? This question has given rise to a significant reassessment of patristic exegetical practice in recent decades, and the present book makes a new contribution to this reappraisal of patristic exegesis against the background of ancient Greco-Roman education. In tracing the practices of literary analysis and rhetorical memory in the ancient sources, this book argues that there were two modes of archival thinking at the heart of the ancient exegetical enterprise: the grammatical archive, a repository of the textual practices learned from the grammarian, and the memorial archive, the constellations of textual memories from which meaning is constructed. In a new treatment of the theological exegesis of Clement of Alexandria—the first study of its kind in English scholarship—this book suggests that an assessment of the reading practices that Clement employs from these two ancient archives reveals his deep commitment to scriptural interpretation as the foundation of a theological imagination. Clement employs various textual practices from the grammatical archive to navigate the spectrum between the clarity and obscurity of Scripture, which results in the striking conclusion that the figurative referent of Scripture is one twofold mystery, bound up in the Incarnation of Christ and the higher knowledge of the divine life. This twofold scriptural mystery is discovered in an act of rhetorical invention as Clement reads Scripture to uncover the constellations of texts—about God, Christ, and humanity—that frame its entire narrative.

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