Grace, Faith, Scripture offers a clear explanation of the Lutheran faith, centered on the three solas - Scripture, grace, and faith - providing Lutherans and non-Lutherans with a better understanding of the unique Lutheran view. Grace, Faith, Scripture can be read devotionally by established Lutherans, and used in Bible studies and new member classes, home Bible studies, and high school youth group studies. It also can be a tool for pastors who want to explain the essence of the Lutheran faith to individuals or groups.
Author Daniel Paavola uses seven biblical themes to explore why God chose to send His Son and patiently build relationships with flawed humans rather than destroy the whole human population and start all over again. Instant Perfection-Patient Relationship. God often chooses to walk with us in a patient relationship of faith and grace. It's the Second that Counts. In the Bible, God often chooses the second over the first. The first is not a mistake, dead end, or waste of time, but God telling us the best is yet to come. One for us A;;. Adam stood for all of us and dragged us into judgment: but Christ stood under ultimate judgment to restore all of us to God. Grace upends Our World. We stubbornly resist God's grace that would lift us out of our past, but God preserves to raise us by the very grace we resist. Greatness ought to look like greatness. We expect God to show His greatness in spotless grandeur, but He often hides it beneath humility and things that seem foolish and weak. Curing the illness itself. We flee it, but God harnesses, directs, and transforms illness into the cure. Perfection welcomes failure. Instead of driving our failures away in fear, the perfect God draws us to Himself while we are yet sinners. Perfect for small groups, adult confirmation classes, and individuals.
This book systematically deconstructs the pervasive and counter-productive discourse surrounding environmental policy. The authors argue that environmental policy problems are always framed such that conflict is inevitable—a particular project or policy must be accepted versus a specific environmental asset that must be protected. Over the course of 12 chapters, the authors demonstrate that confident yet contradictory assertions by contending interests preclude necessary deliberation and reason giving. They argue that deliberation is an important social process of reflecting upon the reasons for doing something. Their innovative approach allows discourse and collaboration to continue, until—after honest and informed deliberation—the better way forward is arrived at. This approach to environmental policy illustrates just how very constructive and enabling the quest for the reasonable can be.
The prescription drug market -- Proposed solutions for rising drug prices -- Measuring the value of prescription drugs -- Measuring drug value : whose job is it anyway? -- Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) -- Other US value assessment frameworks -- Do drugs for special populations warrant higher prices? -- Improving value measurement -- Aligning prices with value -- The path forward.
Peace-building in a number of contemporary contexts involves fragile states, influential customary systems and histories of land conflict arising from mass population displacement. This book is a timely response to the increased international focus on peace-building problems arising from population displacement and post-conflict state fragility. It considers the relationship between property and resilient customary systems in conflict-affected East Timor. The chapters include micro-studies of customary land and population displacement during the periods of Portuguese colonization and Indonesian military occupation. There is also analysis of the development of laws relating to customary land in independent East Timor (Timor Leste). The book fills a gap in socio-legal literature on property, custom and peace-building and is of interest to property scholars, anthropologists, and academics and practitioners in the emerging field of peace and conflict studies.
Today we are seeing a new form of blended learning: not only is technology enhancing the learning environment but formal and informal learning are combining and there is self- and peer-assessment of results. Open learning cultures are challenging the old and long-practiced methods used by educators and transforming learning into a more student-driven and independent activity , which uses online tools such as blogs, wikis or podcasts to connect resources, students and teachers in a novel way. While in higher education institutions most assessments are still tied to formal learning scenarios, teachers are more and more bound to recognize their students’ informal learning processes and networks. This book will help teachers, lecturers and students to better understand how open learning landscapes work, how to define quality and create assessments in such environments, and how to apply these new measures. To this end, Ehlers first elaborates the technological background for more collaborative, distributed, informal, and self-guided learning. He covers the rise of social media for learning and shows how an architecture of participation can change learning activities. These new paradigms are then applied to learning and education to outline what open learning landscapes look like. Here he highlights the shift from knowledge transfer to competence development, the increase in lifelong learning, and the importance of informal learning, user generated content, and open educational resources. He then shows how to manage quality by presenting a step by step guide to developing customized quality concepts for open learning landscapes. Finally, several methods dealing with assessment in these new environments are presented, including guidelines, templates and use cases to exemplify the approaches. Overall, Ehlers argues for assessment as an integral part of learning processes, with quality assurance as a method of stimulating a quality culture and continuous quality development rather than as a simple controlling exercise.
In the standard analysis of economic institutions--which include social conventions, the working rules of an economy, and entitlement regimes (property relations)--economists invoke the same theories they use when analyzing individual behavior. In this profoundly innovative book, Daniel Bromley challenges these theories, arguing instead for "volitional pragmatism" as a plausible way of thinking about the evolution of economic institutions. Economies are always in the process of becoming. Here is a theory of how they become. Bromley argues that standard economic accounts see institutions as mere constraints on otherwise autonomous individual action. Some approaches to institutional economics--particularly the "new" institutional economics--suggest that economic institutions emerge spontaneously from the voluntary interaction of economic agents as they go about pursuing their best advantage. He suggests that this approach misses the central fact that economic institutions are the explicit and intended result of authoritative agents--legislators, judges, administrative officers, heads of states, village leaders--who volitionally decide upon working rules and entitlement regimes whose very purpose is to induce behaviors (and hence plausible outcomes) that constitute the sufficient reasons for the institutional arrangements they create. Bromley's approach avoids the prescriptive consequentialism of contemporary economics and asks, instead, that we see these emergent and evolving institutions as the reasons for the individual and aggregate behavior their very adoption anticipates. These hoped-for outcomes comprise sufficient reasons for new laws, judicial decrees, and administrative rulings, which then become instrumental to the realization of desired individual behaviors and thus aggregate outcomes.
This book analyses the seminal role of megaprojects for sustainable development, and the related, complex challenges they bring. It provides insights into the growing social responsibilities that megaprojects have, not only to be environmentally sustainable, but also towards the multitude of stakeholders involved, whether directly or indirectly. After an historical overview of the increasingly necessary links between sustainable infrastructure and megaprojects, the book builds on and applies stakeholder theory to stakeholder engagement and management in megaprojects. It also emphasizes the importance of building impact assessment frameworks that consider the unheard voices that are often passively sitting at the receiving end of a megaproject, as well as the local context where the megaproject is embedded. The book then proceeds to analyse the case of a very contested transnational railway megaproject between Italy and France, the Turin-Lyon high-speed railway, which has been suffering from stakeholder and communication issues for over thirty years, as well as from notable managerial and legal differences in the two countries. In this way, the book informs both theory and practice and encourages scholarly interventions into wicked problems. It contains a comprehensive review of the academic literature on the sustainability, sustainability challenges, and sustainability reporting of megaprojects. Conceptual models, frameworks and future research opportunities are provided to clarify the empirical challenges and highlight the gaps and opportunities to be explored by researchers and practitioners in future. The audience for the book is both academic researchers and practitioners in the field of megaprojects and more specifically, those dealing with managing transnational megaprojects. It also includes several topics that will be of interest to policy and decision-makers.
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