Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

If true unity is only found in the Church, then we must ask ourselves, "what can I give up to submit myself to Christ and His Body?" Listen as Fr. Tom calls us to remember our unique individuality, but not to the exclusion of our connectedness to one another.

Dr. John Mark Reynolds talks about how Christian education and the secular world can work together.

Dr. Rossi conducts an interview with the Dean of Students at St Vladimir's Orthodox Seminary who gave a talk on this topic to a parish recently.

What is implied in the "our" of the "Our Father"? In this week's episode, Fr. Matthew examines two passages from St Cyprian's treatise on the Lord's Prayer, which focus on questions of unity and community in the Son of God. Do we live this communion in our own life of prayer?

Fr. Eugen Pentiuc examines the use of metaphor and the importance of maintaining a sense of wonder.

Ancient Faith Radio presents an interview with Georgia Williams, one of the founders and an administrator of the Russian Orphan Opportunity Fund (ROOF), about this important organization's needs and ministry opportunities.

Metropolitan Jonah presided over the 2012 Sunday of Orthodoxy Vespers held at Holy Cross Antiochian Orthodox Church in Linthicum, MD, and spoke on Orthodox unity in America.

On this special episode of “Ancient Faith Presents,” Bishop John Abdalah, an auxiliary bishop for the Antiochian Diocese of Worcester and New England, offers the first keynote address at a conference at Hellenic College Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology titled “Pastoral Challenges in Marriage: O God, Replenish Their Life with All Good Things.”

Bobby Maddex interviews George Matsoukas, the Executive Director of Orthodox Christian Laity (OCL), and Alexei Krindatch, the Research Coordinator of the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of North and Central America, about the upcoming OCL Program Meeting at St. Vladimir's Seminary.

Fr. Pat places the theme of Christian unity and peace in our present historical context.

The unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace is certainly the gift of God. But St. Paul considers a great deal of human effort to be necessary for its maintenance. It does not take care of itself. Fr. Pat fleshes this out.

Christians seem more divided than ever. Is there really such a thing as "one" Church? Does Christian unity even matter? Father Andrew Stephen Damick joins Steve to tackle these important questions!

This week's episode features a speech that Matthew delivered at the 2009 St. Vladimir's Seminary Summer Conference on the myth of past unity in American Orthodox history. Click here for supplemental material related to this episode.

When your attention goes to many things, no real progress is ever made. Not all opportunities are worth pursuing — especially if it means being pulled away from something that is currently working.

St Pauls residents say the garden helps them to "slow down" during the pandemic.

Sisters Alice, Chloe and Lucy will be part of the Children in Need Choir on Friday.

Personalisation in marketing works because personal connections matter. That extends beyond your customers, too. Personal connections include the relationships you have with your suppliers, your stakeholders, your employees, industry peers… the list goes on.

I’ve written quite a few articles in the last year or so on the use of AI in a localization setting, and in general as a tool to help you complete technical tasks you may not have been able to do without help until now.  Certainly I’ve been making extensive use of this technology to … Continue reading AI and Community

In order to reduce the challenges encountered by learners and educators in engaging in educational activities, this paper classifies learners' roles in virtual learning communities, and explores the role of behaviour characteristics and their positions in collaborative knowledge construction networks in promoting the process of knowledge construction. This study begins with an analysis of the relationship structure among learners in the virtual learning community and then applies the FCM algorithm to arrange learners into various dimensional combinations and create distinct learning communities. The test results demonstrate that the FCM method performs consistently during the clustering process, with less performance oscillations, and good node aggregation, the ARI value of the model is up to 0.90. It is found that they play an important role in the social interaction of learners' virtual learning community, which plays a certain role in promoting the development of artificial intelligence.

This paper describes the FISHNet project, which developed a repository environment for the curation and sharing of data relating to freshwater science, a discipline whose research community is distributed thinly across a variety of institutions, and usually works in relative isolation as individual researchers or within small groups. As in other “small sciences”, these datasets tend to be small and “hand-crafted”, created to address particular research questions rather than with a view to reuse, so they are rarely curated effectively, and the potential for sharing and reusing them is limited. The paper addresses a variety of issues and concerns raised by freshwater researchers as regards data sharing, describes our approach to developing a repository environment that addresses these concerns, and identifies the potential impact within the research community of the system.

The Penn State University Libraries and Information Technology Services (ITS) collaborated on the development of Curation Architecture Prototype Services (CAPS), a web application for ingest and management of digital objects. CAPS is built atop a prototype service platform providing atomistic curation functions in order to address the current and emerging requirements in the Libraries and ITS for digital curation, defined as “... maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for future and current use; specifically, the active management and appraisal of data over the entire life cycle” (Pennock, 2006)[7]. Additional key goals for CAPS were application of an agile-style methodology to the development process and an assessment of the resulting tool and stakeholders’ experience in the project. This article focuses in particular on the community-building aspects of CAPS, which emerged from a combination of agile-style approaches and our commitment to engage stakeholders actively throughout the process, from the construction of use cases, to decisions on metadata standards, to ingest and management functionalities of the tool. The ensuing community of curatorial practice effectively set the stage for the next iteration of CAPS, which will be devoted to planning and executing the development of a production-ready, enterprise-quality infrastructure to support publishing and curation services at Penn State.

Aim/Purpose: This paper explored the factors (enablers and barriers) that affect Bitcoin adoption in South Africa, a Sub-Saharan country with the high potential for Bitcoin adoption. Background: In recent years, Bitcoin has seen a rapid growth as a virtual cryptocurrency throughout the world. Bitcoin is a protocol which allows value to be exchanged over the internet without a central bank or intermediary. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are technological tools that arguably can contribute to reducing transactions costs. This paper explored the factors that affect Bitcoin adoption in South Africa, a Sub-Saharan country with the high potential for Bitcoin adoption, as little is known about the factors that affect Bitcoin adoption and the barriers to adoption. Methodology: A quantitative questionnaire was distributed to South African virtual communities where Bitcoin is a topic of interest, and 237 quantitative responses were received, along with 212 open-ended comments. Contribution: This research contributes to the body of knowledge in information systems by providing insights into factors that affect Bitcoin adoption in South Africa. It raises awareness of incentives and barriers to Bitcoin adoption at a time when financial literacy is a crucial issue both in South Africa and worldwide. Findings: The results indicate that perceived benefit, attitude towards Bitcoin, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control directly affected the participants’ intentions to use Bitcoin. Perceived benefit, usefulness, ease of use, and trust-related risk were found to indirectly affect intention to use Bitcoin. Further, it emerges that the barriers to Bitcoin adoption in South Africa consist of the complex nature of Bitcoin and its high degree of volatility. Recommendations for Practitioners: Bitcoin can contribute to reducing transactions costs, but factors that affect adoption and the barriers to adoption should be taken into consideration. These findings can inform systems and software developers to develop applications that make managing Bitcoin keys and transacting using Bitcoin less complex and more intuitive for end users. Recommendation for Researchers: Bitcoin adoption in South Africa is a topic that has not been previously researched. Researchers could research similarities or differences in the various constructs that were used in this research model. Impact on Society: South African Bitcoin users consider it as a universal currency that makes cross-border payments cheaper. A large number of refugees and workers in South Africa make regular payments across borders. Bitcoin could reduce the costs of these transfers. Future Research: Future research could explore Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) adoption in other developing countries. Researchers could look at factors that influence cryptocurrency adoption in general. The factors affecting adoption of other cryptocurrencies can be compared to the results of this study, and similarities and differences can thus be identified.

Aim/Purpose: This study examines the kind of community value companies should provide when strengthening the relationship between customers and brands through the establishment of an online brand community, and how this kind of community value promotes customers’ sense of community engagement and willingness to spread brand reputation. The paper also discusses how an enterprise’s brand symbolism affects the relationship between community value and customers’ engagement in online brand community. This study explored the important role of brand symbolism in the establishment of an online brand community. Background: Many companies want to create online brand communities to strengthen their relationships with consumers as well as to provide better service and value to consumers, for example, Huawei’s Huafen community (club.huawei.com), Apple’s support community (support.apple.com/zh-cn), and Samsung’s Galaxy community (samsungmembers.cn). However, these brand communities may have different interests and consumer engagement about the kind of community value to offer to their customers. Methodology: This study uses data collection from questionnaire surveys to design a quantitative research method. An online questionnaire survey of mobile phone users in China was conducted to collect data on social value, cognitive value, brand symbolism, customer community engagement, and brand recommendation. The brands of mobile phone include Apple, Huawei, Samsung, OPPO, VIVO, MI, and Meizu. The researcher purchased a sample service of WJX, an online survey company (www.wjx.cn), and WJX company distributed the questionnaire to research participants. The WJX company randomly selected 240 subjects from their sample database and then sent the questionnaire link to research participants’ mobile phones. Among the 240 research participants, the researcher excluded participants who lacked online brand community experience or had invalid data to qualify for data collection. After the researcher excluded participants who did not qualify for data collection, only 203 qualified questionnaire surveys advanced to the data collection and analysis phase, which was the questionnaire recovery rate of 84.58%. For the model analysis and hypotheses testing, the researcher used statistical software IBM SPSS Statistics and AMOS 21 and Smartpls3. Contribution: This study deepens the body of literature knowledge by combining online brand community value and brand symbolic value to explore issues that companies should consider when establishing an online brand community for their products and services. This study confirms that brands with high symbolic value establish communities and strengthen social values in the online brand community rather than reducing brand symbolism. Online brand community involves a horizontal interaction (peer interaction) among peers, which can have an effect on the symbolic value of brand (social distance). Findings: First, online brand community value (both cognitive and social value) has a positive impact on customer community engagement. Second, customer community engagement has a positive impact on customers’ brand recommend intention. Third, the customer community engagement is a mediator between the online brand community value and the customer brand recommend intention. Most importantly, fourth, the symbolic value of the brand controls the relationship between community value and customer community engagement. For brands with high symbolic value, the community value should emphasize cognitive value rather than social value. For brands with a low symbolic value, the community provides cognitive or social value, which is not affected by the symbolism of the brand. Recommendations for Practitioners: Practitioners can share best practices with the corporate sectors. Brand owners can work with researchers to explore the characteristics of their online brand communities. On this basis, brand owners and researchers can jointly build and manage online brand communities. Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers can explore different perspectives and factors of brand symbolism that involve brand owners when establishing an online brand community to advance consumer engagement, community value, and brand symbolism. Impact on Society: Online brand community is relevant for brand owners to establish brand symbolism, community value, and customer engagement. Readers of this paper can gain an understanding that cognitive and social values are two important drivers of individual participation in online brand communities. The discussion of these two factors can give readers and brand owners the perception to gain more understanding on social and behavior activities in online brand communities. Future Research: Practitioners and researchers could follow-up in the future with a study to provide more understanding and updated research information from different perspectives of research samples and hypotheses on online brand community.

Aim/Purpose: These days educators are expected to integrate technological tools into classes. Although they acquire relevant skills, they are often reluctant to use these tools. Background: We incorporated online forums for generating a Community of Inquiry (CoI) in a faculty development program. Extending the Technology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge (TPACK) model with Assessment Knowledge and content analysis of forum discourse and reflection after each CoI, we offer the Diagnostic Tool for Learning, Assessment, and Research (DTLAR). Methodology: This study spanned over two cycles of a development program for medical faculty. Contribution: This study demonstrates how the DTLAR supports in-depth examination of the benefits and challenges of using CoIs for learning and teaching. Findings: Before the program, participants had little experience with, and were reluctant to use, CoIs in classes. At the program completion, many were willing to adopt CoIs and appreciated this method’s contribution. Both CoIs discourse and reflections included positive attitudes regarding cognitive and teacher awareness categories. However, negative attitudes regarding affective aspects and time-consuming aspects of CoIs were exposed. Participants who experienced facilitating a CoI gained additional insights into its usefulness. Recommendations for Practitioners : The DTLAR allows analyzing adaption of online forums for learning and teaching. Recommendation for Researchers: The DTLAR allows analyzing factors that affect the acceptance of online fo-rums for learning and teaching. Impact on Society : While the tool was implemented in the context of medical education, it can be readily applied in other adult learning programs. Future Research: The study includes several design aspects that probably affected the improve-ment and challenges we found. Future research is called for providing guidelines for identifying boundary conditions and potential for further improvement.

We advance a model that highlights contingent linkages between overconfidence and narcissism, entrepreneurial entry, and the successful realization of venture opportunities. Overall, our proposals point to a paradox in which entrepreneurs high in overconfidence and narcissism are propelled toward more novel venture contexts—where these qualities are most detrimental to venture success, and are repelled from more familiar venture contexts—where these qualities are least harmful, and may even facilitate venture success. To illuminate these patterns of misalignment, we attend to the defining characteristics of alternative venture contexts and the focal mechanisms of overconfidence and narcissism.