LCC International University

As sustainability becomes increasingly important for corporations across Europe, it is crucial to debate whether sustainability communication through sustainability reports fosters genuine mindset transformation among stakeholders [...]

While many experiences shape young adults during the college years, mentoring relationships may be particularly influential in producing enduring outcomes. This cross-sectional, survey-based study ( N = 419 church-attending adults over age 22, approximately half of whom were pastors) investigates whether the degree of mentoring during ages 18–22 predicts four present-day outcomes: life satisfaction, coping with stress, seeking God's will, and having a sense of calling. The hypotheses were supported for three of the outcomes—life satisfaction, coping with stress, and having a sense of calling—even after controlling for other formative factors (campus ministry involvement, local church involvement, spiritual practices such as prayer and personal Bible study, and faith sharing) and demographic variables. The relationship between mentoring and seeking God's will was significant only for non-pastors, suggesting that mentoring may be especially important for cultivating spiritual attentiveness among laypersons. These findings underline the importance of local churches and campus ministries prioritizing mentoring relationships with college-aged young adults during this formative developmental period.

Cora Barnhart and Leslie Turner’s article, “After the Fall: Scriptural Implications for Artificial Intelligence Innovation,” is a timely and insightful piece on the Christian response to the growing penetration of artificial intelligence systems across industries.

One argument for the permissibility of euthanasia found in the African philosophical tradition suggests that the sole goal of life is to develop one’s vital force, which is done by relating harmoniously with one’s community. However, this is impossible for people with certain medical conditions. If the goals of life cannot be achieved, then euthanasia is permissible. I challenge this argument by showing that it overlooks the fact that severely ill patients can still be the objects of communal relationships, in addition to a way for caregivers to strengthen their own vital force. I also suggest that usual readings of vital force imply that life itself is to be preserved at all costs and that this acts as a kind of deontological constraint.

Transactional and interactional English communications tend to be on a continuum rather than a dichotomy, with some communications having characteristics of both, yet others tending more toward one type of communication or the other. In general, written communication tends to be more informative (transactional) than spoken communication, which tends to include more interactional communication. Using insights from geosemiotics and linguistic analysis, this study analyzed spoken English-as-a-lingua-franca (ELF) communication observed in Dubai/Sharjah and written communication in public signs in Al Ain, looking at how contextual influences play a role in facilitating hearer/reader understanding of the meaning being communicated. From identified ELF communications in Dubai/Sharjah and photographed public signs with English text in Al Ain in the UAE, 10 spoken and eight written instances of transactional English were selected to be analyzed in terms of patterns in the role of context in hearer/reader understanding of intended meaning. Comparing/contrasting contextualization of these spoken and written transactional English communications revealed the influence of the context on hearer/reader awareness of spatiotemporal aspects, background schemata (social/societal, cultural, economic, and religious aspects), prior communications, and ELF mutual accommodation of meaning in terms of understanding and interpreting intended meaning, as well as identifying aspects of contextualization common to both spoken and written transactional English.

Abstract An important belief in African Traditional Religion holds that everything, both animate and inanimate objects, are imbued with an imperceptible energy known as life force. Since life force is the greatest value, it is the grounds of morality. However, it is undertheorized in contemporary African ethics, with work on personhood and harmonious relationships taking centerstage. I seek to fill this gap in the literature by further developing an entirely secular and naturalistic moral theory of life force that avoids metaphysical controversies and is known as liveliness, which was first gestured at by Thaddeus Metz (2012, 2022). I demonstrate that while a series of objections that Metz levels against liveliness affect teleological versions, they do not apply with equal force to deontological versions. Liveliness, particularly deontological versions, ought to be considered as a contender for the best African moral theory alongside those that focus on personhood or harmonious relationships.