Briercrest College and Seminary

Clergy play significant leadership, educational, and caregiving roles in society. However, burnout is a concern for the clergy profession, those they serve, and their families. Effects include decreased ministry effectiveness, lower sense of personal accomplishment in their role, and negative impacts on quality of family life and relationships. Given these risks, knowledge of the nature of Christian clergy’s current resilience and well-being in Canada may provide valuable intelligence to mitigate these challenges. In summary, the purpose of this research was to describe and analyze the status of clergy resilience and well-being in Canada, together with offering focused insights. Resilience and well-being surveys used by the co-authors with educators and nurses were adapted for use in this study. This instrument was developed to gain insight into baseline patterns of resilience and well-being and included questions across seven sections: (1) demographic information. (2) health status, (3) professional quality of life, (4) Cantril Well-Being Scale, (5) Ego-Resiliency Scale, (6) Grit Scale, and (7) open-ended questions. The findings provided valuable insights into clergy well-being and resilience that can benefit individual clerics, educational institutions, denominations, and congregations. The participants’ current resilience and well-being included high levels of resiliency, moderate grit, and satisfaction with health and wellness. Other significant findings included the impact of congregational flourishing and age. This study found that clergy well-being and resilience was doing well despite the increased adversity of the COVID-19 pandemic. Implications of this study are that clerics may need unique supports based on their age and also whether they serve in a congregation they perceive as flourishing.

Martin Koci and Jason Alvis (eds.), "Transforming the Theological Turn: Phenomenology with Emmanuel Falque.". Un article de la revue Philosophy in Review (Volume 41, numéro 3, août 2021, p. 182-226) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Ecclesiastes has received a number of postmodern-styled readings in recent decades. One such piece by Mark Sneed distinguishes itself by applying deconstructive methods to show Qohelet's internal contradictions. Although Sneed's argument is helpful and illuminating, certain aspects of Derrida's articulation of ‘deconstruction’ are not well represented. In this article, an alternative ‘deconstruction’ of Qohelet is offered which attempts to witness to tensions within the text instead of applying predetermined concepts from outside.

This article examines a structural phenomenon in Isaiah 1—39 in which different sections of a prophecy are deliberately placed out of order either logically or chronologically. After an initial example from chs. 24—27, chs. 11, 30 and 2 are discussed. In each of these three cases, it is argued that later passages in the respective chapters (11.11-16, 30.27-33 and 2.6-22) describe necessary preconditions for the earlier passages (11.1-9, 30.18-26 and 2.1-5) to come into being—more specifically, YHWH's defeat of the nations must occur before creation is renewed, Israel dwells secure on Zion, and the nations come to worship there. The implications of this analysis for theories of the redaction of these three chapters are then considered, and a tentative conclusion reached that assignation of the various passages of these chapters to different centuries is less likely than hypothesizing a simpler compositional history, in which the different passages making up these chapters were written with each other in mind from the beginning.