In this consensual qualitative research study, we investigated the role of refugees' Christian faith in meaning-making coping. High percentages of religiosity in refugee populations support the need to understand the role of religion in their coping processes. Interviews with 20 Christian refugees from 10 African and Asian countries revealed that participants drew heavily from their faith resources to cope with their experiences. Specifically, refugees reported coping practices that included trust in God, prayer, intimacy with God, spiritual surrender, lament, worship, and social support. Although many participants described spiritual struggles, including doubting God, feeling distant from God, and questioning God, most found meaning amid refugee-related suffering and reported perspective shifts, a deepening of faith, seeing suffering as part of God's plan, experiencing a deepened sense of purpose, and growing in the likeness of Christ. Refugees also reported growth through suffering in the form of gratitude, altruism, testimony, and humility. Clinical implications include encouraging the use of religious resources for meaning-making and supporting the resolution of spiritual struggles.

While religious meaning-making has been extensively studied, emic religious coping remains largely unexplored. This consensual qualitative research study explored Catholic cancer survivors' (N = 22) descriptions of drawing on their religious framework throughout their cancer journeys. Findings revealed distinctive Catholic resources such as the power of blessings, drawing comfort from the saints and sacraments, and "offering up" suffering as a form of spiritual surrender, suggesting the existence of underlying theodicies of divine purpose as well as potential clinical resources. While many participants described spiritual struggles and questions, most found meaning through deepening their faith, helping others, and re-examining their priorities. Exploratory mixed-method analyses suggest that questioning God may promote turning toward faith, while being angry at God is associated with difficulty in doing so. The findings have implications for research, pointing to emic practices that merit further study.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-023-04642-w.

The synthesis of novel aluminyl anion complexes has been well exploited in recent years. Moreover, the elucidation of the structure and reactivity of these complexes opens the path toward a new understanding of low-valent aluminum complexes and their chemistry. This work computationally treats the substituent effect on aluminyl anions to discover suitable alternatives for H2 activation at a high level of theory utilizing coupled-cluster techniques extrapolated to the complete basis set. The results reveal that the simplest AlH2- system is the most reactive toward the activation of H2, but due to the low steric demand, severe difficulty in the stabilization of this system makes its use nonviable. However, the results indicate that, in principle, aluminyl systems with -C, -CN, -NC, and -N chelating centers would be the best choices of ligand toward the activation of molecular hydrogen by taking care of suitable steric demand to prevent dimerization of the catalysts. Furthermore, computations show that monosubstitution (besides -H) in aluminyl anions is preferred over disubstitution. So our predictions show that bidentate ligands may yield less reactive aluminyl anions to activate H2 than monodentate ones.

ABSTRACT Several recent studies consider the determinants of misconduct by military personnel deployed to United Nations peacekeeping operations (PKOs). While the majority of peacekeepers carry out their duties honorably and often at great personal risk, these studies operate from the premise that misconduct by even a few peacekeepers can undermine a mission, and reduce support for future missions. Even so, misconduct by civilian police deployed to PKOs remains massively understudied in comparison to their military counterparts, though UN police are more likely to face credible allegations of misconduct compared to UN troops. Based on the inclusive or extractive incentives of contributor states, we find support for the argument that the behavior of security personnel at home readily predicts misconduct when deployed to PKOs. This same logic has implications for the UN's increasingly preferred ‘Formed Police Units,’ whose use may actually increase the likelihood of sexual exploitation and abuse.

Abstract It is widely granted that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Princeton Theological Seminary had come to be recognized as an international bastion of evangelical and Reformed orthodoxy. Students, drawn to Princeton from across the USA and many points across the globe, returned home to teach and preach the Christian faith as Princeton had relayed it to them. Since the denominationally-mandated reorganization of this seminary in 1929, conservative evangelicals have circulated a narrative describing the seminary as undergoing a ‘death’ in that year. This essay seeks to show both that the theological reorientation of this seminary was much more gradual than this now-customary narrative would allow, and that the graduates of this seminary from both before and after 1929 went on exercising a wide national and international evangelical leadership for decades beyond the reorganization.

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.

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.