McMaster Divinity College

Abstract In his recent commentary on the book of Jeremiah, Michael B. Shepherd has made a novel contribution by basing his translation and exegesis on the shorter edition of Jeremiah reflected by the Old Greek (OG) translation and two witnesses from Qumran (4QJerb, d). Giving preference to the Hebrew source behind OG as the more original form of the book of Jeremiah, he argues that the MT presents a systematically revised edition of Jeremiah reflecting a historization of the prophetic material, which stands in contrast to the more open-ended, eschatological version of the shorter edition. Alongside his translation and commentary, Shepherd provides a reconstruction of the entire Hebrew Vorlage behind OG-Jeremiah. This review engages critically with Shepherd’s contribution as it relates specifically to textual scholarship on the book of Jeremiah and other attempts at reconstructing either the Vorlage of OG-Jeremiah or the shorter Hebrew edition of Jeremiah. Attention is given to key methodological questions that must be accounted for in both retroverting OG and reconstructing Jeremiah’s shorter edition, as well as to the importance of a nuanced and comprehensive account of OG-Jeremiah’s translation technique. It is concluded that, despite its ingenuity and many commendable features, Shepherd’s work is hindered by numerous shortcomings and does not achieve a definitive reconstruction of the shorter edition of Jeremiah upon which future scholarship can build without extensive revision.

ABSTRACT In this literature review, I integrate available data on the experiences of Canadian female ministers to assess the cultural impact on their roles within the church. The review reveals a widespread presence of sexism in Canadian churches across various denominations, including those with a long history of ordaining women. Canadian churches remain male-dominant workplaces, with conditions that are often less equitable than those in the broader Canadian workforce. Women encounter a significant discrepancy between their churches’ stated beliefs and actual practices, making their ministry experiences feel like an uphill battle. These findings highlight the necessity for Canadian churches to go beyond merely ordaining women. A deeper commitment to transforming church culture towards mutual love and respect is essential for truly reflecting Christ’s love in the community.

Abstract This article explores how early Pentecostals read, interpreted, and utilized the character of Miriam within the Old Testament. Despite the prominent focus upon masculine Old Testament figures within pentecostal history, the reception of feminine figures within Pentecostalism is less clear. As such, this article seeks to uncover how Miriam the prophetess was presented and interpreted within early pentecostal literature, with the emphasis on such subjects as divine healing, dancing, support for women in ministry, faithfulness, and murmuring. These interpretations of Miriam demonstrate positive and negative appraisals of her character and reflect her multifaceted reception within Pentecostalism. Finally, this article concludes with a summary of these interpretations and a call for continued reflection upon historic readings within pentecostal history.

ABSTRACT Using the Indigenous Three Sisters gardening technique as a guiding metaphor, this paper will explore a wholly embodied response to the disturbing headlines of the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at residential schools across Canada in 2021. Just as the Indigenous Three Sisters cooperate together for mutual flourishing, the Beatitudinal trio of humility, grief, and meekness will be promoted as characteristics of a wholly embodied response to this specific issue and the large issue it represents, which is an oppressive and troubled historic relationship between Indigenous and white settlers. This paper will use Terry A. Veiling’s double exegetical approach of ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ as the underlying practical theology framework. Perspectives of various Indigenous Canadian theologians along with hopeful stories of white settler Canadian church leaders whose performative and incarnational responses resemble the three sisterly Beatitudes will be included throughout. I see the flourishing of the Three Sisters together as a helpful and practical metaphor for the Canadian church as we consider how humility, grief, and meekness can help us neighbour well with Indigenous people.

Abstract Political strife and cultural upheaval characterize public life in the United States today. When did it start? Not with Donald J. Trump’s election, but he certainly amplified and accelerated these trends. Do the Spirit of Pentecost and communities of people filled with and empowered by the Holy Spirit offer a way forward beyond the acrimony, hatreds, bigotries, and political polarities? The articles in this issue think they do. With these concerns and questions in mind, the articles presented here assess, critique, and offer constructive proposals for pentecostal political theology and practice in the age of Trump and beyond. This introductory article lays groundwork, historical and theological, for the generative contributions these articles make to pentecostal political theology in the United States.

Electronic communication of the Christian message—online preaching—raises distinct theological challenges. Notwithstanding the undeniable convenience and unlimited geographical reach of “virtual church”, electronic media have the potential to separate preacher from congregants, congregants from one another, and—potentially of greatest concern—the church from God, even while appearing to accomplish the opposite. Communication theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) argues provocatively that virtual representation is at the cost of authentic human identity (in which case it is inimical to community), while French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) warns of substituting representation for reality, especially in matters of theology and the identity of God. The paradigm of Jesus’ Incarnation, by contrast, mandates un-mediated divine-human and human-to-human communication, requiring engagement between persons themselves rather than their avatars or provisional simulacra. With respect to electronically mediated communication itself, acknowledging divine initiative in the formation of identity (as a feature of soteriology) and of understanding (under the category of revelation) countermands the more dehumanizing and anti-theological influences that McLuhan and Baudrillard both identify, encouraging direct engagement with God in the person of the Holy Spirit rather than resorting to technological mediation.

This study was aimed at developing a neural network to classify the lung volume state of a subject (i.e. high lung volume (HLV) or low lung volume (LLV), where the subject had fully inhaled or exhaled, respectively) by analyzing cardiac cycles extracted from vibrational cardiography (VCG) signals. A total of 15619 cardiac cycles were recorded from 50 subjects, of which 9989 cycles were recorded in the HLV state and the remaining 5630 cycles were recorded in the LLV state. A 1D convolutional neural network (CNN) was employed to classify the lung volume state of these cardiac cycles. The CNN model was evaluated using a train/test split of 80/20 on the data. The developed model was able to correctly classify the lung volume state of 99.4% of the testing data. VCG cardiac cycles can be classified based on lung volume state using a CNN. These results provide evidence of a correlation between VCG and respiration volume, which could inform further analysis into VCG-based cardio-respiratory monitoring.

In this study, we offer an exploratory factor analysis of three corpora of Greek texts from the Hellenistic era. We draw generalizations from the data about some of the chief patterns of morphosyntactic variation within these texts, under the theoretical assumption that these patterns are indicative of register variation. This variation realizes changes in the situational contexts that gave rise to each of the texts. We ultimately find that both our smaller corpus and our larger corpus indicate the same major factors of variation. We argue these patterns thus represent generalized situational parameters useful for characterizing these texts. At the same time, since these patterns are not reproduced through examination of the intra-textual chapters or sections of the generally balanced book, the Epistle to the Romans, we have argued that situational parameters are realized by the ratios of entire texts, as semantic units, rather than portions of texts, which are components of those units. The papyri and ostraca in our third corpus introduce a third level of analysis, allowing for a gradient distinction between literary and non-literary texts. This study serves as a point of reference for future analysis and demonstrates that intra-text units, such as the episode, chapter, or pericope, are not the correct units of analysis for identifying situational parameters, since such units are not indicative of the patterns of register variation observed across multiple corpora.