Providence University College and Theological Seminary

Abstract The focus of job satisfaction literature remains on the subordinate even though supervisors are responsible for evaluating employee performance, determining employee pay, raises, promotions, growth opportunities, etc., all of which impact employees’ subsequent performance that contributes (or not) to organizational success. Using a psychological contracts lens, we develop and test theoretical arguments predicting supervisors’ response to contributions is not uniformly positive depending on the type and amount of contribution involved. Across two studies, we ask supervisors to evaluate subordinates’ delivered contributions relative to promised contributions. Our results challenge the assumption that supervisors always desire larger amounts of work from their subordinates; excess contributions were associated with lower supervisors’ satisfaction with subordinates for some types of contributions. The results imply that subordinates’ contributions of work to supervisors may influence supervisors’ satisfaction with subordinates perhaps affecting their performance reviews and career opportunities.

The inherent nature of work in correctional services can have negative effects on correctional worker mental health and well-being. The current study, a replication, analyzes survey data collected from provincial and territorial correctional workers staffed in six regions across Canada (n = 192). Specifically, participants were asked at the end of an extensive mental health and well-being survey an open-ended question requesting any additional feedback or information. Four predominant themes were identified in the data: (1) stigma pertaining to a need to recognize mental health concerns within correctional services; (2) the idea that correctional services wear on the mind and body; (3) a need for better relationships with and support from correctional supervisors, upper management, and ministerial leadership; and (4) suggestions to improve correctional services to help the sector realize its full potential and maximize workplace health. We discuss the implications of these findings, with an emphasis on finding ways to promote positive organizational and cultural change in correctional services.

GENERAL COMMENTARY article Front. Behav. Neurosci., 13 August 2020 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2020.00127

Religious themes are widespread in humane writing about animals. In some cases, appeal to religious authority provides a basis for moral argument against cruelty, as is the case with Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) and Margaret Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe (1894). Others, like Richard Adams’s widely-read Watership Down (1972), introduce species-specific theologies or, as in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), forms of nature mysticism. This chapter asks what purposes religious or quasi-religious storylines serve in animal-friendly literature.

Underlying Lewis’s fascination with the Genesis image of Adam and Eve in the Garden with “every beast of the field” (2:19) is the certainty that nature and all the creatures populating earth, sky, and sea are good (1:31). Paradise is lost, yes, but hope remains. Faith clings to the expectation of a restoration, which means, as St. Paul puts it, an end to creation’s groaning. If this is the case, there are implications for Christian ethics in the present. Animal suffering is an evil requiring the response of God’s people while they await the kingdom of God in its fullness. This includes advocacy on behalf of suffering animals.

Abstract In conversation with Karl Barth, this article explores Bonhoeffer's account in his Ethics of the character of the agency exercised by Jesus Christ in the world today in relation to the principal task of theological ethics: namely, the engendering of the most humane form of existence possible within the mandates of work, family, government and church. The article argues that the theological work undertaken by the command of God ensures that these mandates remain christologically determined spheres in which concrete obedience is enacted, and thus the places in which the reality that Jesus Christ is achieves social and historical form.

This article looks at the missionary – widely defined – as a character in late eighteenth-century literature. Specifically, it asks why authors would choose to include stories about failures in missionary endeavours. The paper argues that the answer lies in the pervasive influence of biblical stories on colonial religious discourse. The authors treated here view the failed missionary as a harbinger of the gospel's ultimate success because Jesus himself said as much to his apostles, warning of opposition and rejection prior to the kingdom's ultimate victory. Whether consciously or not, biblical precedents shape the expansionist, Christian rhetoric of these eighteenth and early nineteenth-century writers in such a way that they can accommodate both missionary successes and disappointments in their narratives, without doubting their religious superiority over the non-Christians they describe.