Bishop Grosseteste University

This study was designed to test the power of personality, engagement with leisure activities, and professional support, in order to predict susceptibility to professional burnout among Catholic priests in Portugal. Data provided by 208 priests who completed both the Francis Psychological Type and Emotional Temperament Scales and the Francis Burnout Inventory demonstrated that reported levels of burnout were significantly lower among stable extraverts and among those who engaged more frequently with leisure activities, while no further predictive power was associated with engaging a discipler or mentor. These findings carry implications for the pastoral care and pastoral oversight of priests.

MAI Motion is a motion capture system designed to assess lower-limb biomechanics during functional movements like the sit-to-stand (STS) test. Determining how many repetitions are needed to obtain reliable measurements is critical for balancing data quality and participant burden. This study evaluates whether three repetitions (3x) of STS provide reliable data compared to five repetitions (5x). Three-dimensional videos of participants (n = 20) performing 5x STS movements were captured using MAI Motion. Primary measurements were the mean values of each joint angle and the coefficient of variation (CV). Statistical comparisons (including one way ANOVA followed by paired t-tests or non-parametric equivalents) determined whether differences in mean (DiM) values or CV existed between 3x and 5x. The analysis revealed minimal DiM angles between 3x and 5x. Variability, assessed via CV, showed no clinically meaningful differences. Although ankle angle, knee and hip abduction had higher CV values than the other metrics, 3x and 5x performed similarly. Participants reported that 3x required less effort than 5x, underscoring its potential for clinical application. These findings demonstrate that the MAI Motion system captures comparable biomechanical data to the 5x STS protocol when using a 3x approach. This supports the adoption of 3x as a practical alternative, reducing participant burden.

Background Cancer is a major burden of disease worldwide which continues to rise. Prevalence of falls increases with age, whilst those with a diagnosis of cancer have also been found to be predisposed to a greater risk of falls, partially due to impaired balance. Exercise programs in older adults have been shown to improve balance and reduce fall risk. Objective The aim of this study was to explore the effectiveness of a 10-week circuit training program on balance and fear of falling (FoF) among adults diagnosed with cancer. Methods Participants ( n = 12) completed a 14-item balance (Mini-Balance Evaluation Systems Test (BESTest)) and FoF (Falls Efficacy Scale - International (FES-I)) assessment prior to taking part in a 10-week circuit training program. Upon completion of the program, participants completed a post-assessment, consisting of the Mini-BESTest and FES-I. Results Balance significantly improved, as measured by the Mini-BESTest ( p = 0.003; mean difference: 15.2%; BCa 95% CI: 10.1% to 20.8%), with significant improvements in three of the four subcomponents ( Reactive Postural Control : p < 0.001; Dynamic Gait : p < 0.001; Anticipatory Postural Adjustments : p = 0.046) following the 10-week circuit training program. FoF significantly decreased following the program ( p = 0.026; mean difference: −4.8; BCa 95% CI: −8.1 to −1.9). Conclusion A 10-week circuit training program significantly improved balance and reduced FoF among older adults diagnosed with cancer. Such exercise interventions could be considered as part of routine care following a diagnosis of cancer, as they may help reduce healthcare costs and improve quality of life among people with cancer.

Psychological type and psychological temperament theory have contributed to the two fields of congregation studies and clergy studies. The present study brings these two fields together by drawing on data from an online survey employing the Francis Psychological Type and Emotional Temperament Scales promoted among clergy and laity in the United States. The analyses compare the profiles of 467 clergywomen and 1,910 female churchgoers, and the profiles of 418 clergymen and 859 male churchgoers, affiliated with the Episcopal Church in the United States. The data are consistent with findings from earlier research among Anglicans in England and Wales, indicating significant differences in type and temperament between Anglican clergy and the members of their congregations. For example, in terms of temperament theory 66% of female churchgoers and 68% of male churchgoers reported as sensing and judging (SJ) compared with 43% of clergywomen and 48% of clergymen. Appreciation of these differences may help to promote greater understanding between Anglican clergy and laity.

Drawing on data provided by 1476 newly ordained Anglican clergy from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales who completed the Keirsey Temperament Sorter and an 80-item battery of type-related prayer preference items, this study tested the thesis advanced by Michael and Norrisey that the Apollonian (NF) temperament is associated with a distinctive emphasis in prayer and spirituality. The analysis identified seventeen prayer preference items that were rated significantly more highly by NF participants. These items produced a revised Scale of Apollonian Prayer Preferences with an alpha of .79 (offering internal consistency reliability), recorded significantly higher scores among NF participants (offering construct validity), and resonated with characteristics of Augustinian prayer and spirituality (offering content validity). These data replicate previously reported findings in support of a link between the NF temperament and Augustinian prayer preferences. Our findings have implications for NF clergy both in their own prayers and in their ministry with others.

Black women exist in a contested space in higher education (HE) in the United Kingdom where they can be used in a tokenistic way as visible confirmation of how well an organisation is realising its organisational aims of equality as required under the Public Sector Duty, while at the same time often being denied opportunities which are routinely allocated to their White counterparts (Bernard, 2007; Wilson, 2007). While the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (2021) reported the crude racist expressions were now, mostly, features of the past, the findings of this research indicated that Black women could not necessarily expect support from within their organisation nor could they rely on internal systems to either provide them with the protection they needed or opportunities to progress in their careers. Instead, more often, Black women needed to build their own support networks and plot their own paths for progression.

The present study was designed to translate the Francis Burnout Inventory Revised into Portuguese and to test this translation among a snowball sample of 266 Catholic priests serving in Portugal (91% diocesan). The data demonstrated: good internal consistency reliability for the two scales proposed by this instrument (negative affect, α = .89 and positive affect, α = .89); support for the association with a measure of self-compassion; and support for the theory of balanced affect against a measure of thoughts of leaving ministry. The priests were found to display a high level of positive affect that masked a degree of negative affect, with a third of them reporting that fatigue and irritation were part of their daily experience.

Flexischooling—the sharing of a child's education between home and school through formal agreement—is one of a range of ‘alternative’ education approaches that may adapt education to meet a child's special educational needs. This study considers qualitative data from an online survey conducted during November and December 2023 regarding parents' reasons for undertaking flexischooling with their child, and the activities they describe their children undertaking during school hours. Findings suggest that parents are concerned about the challenges that they feel their child faces in full‐time school, but that they also perceive advantages, both social and academic, to the ‘not‐school’ element of the educational approach they are undertaking. Consideration of the potential for flexischooling to support parents as they learn about their child's ever‐changing needs is discussed.

The memory found in scholarship of confessional manuals is that of mnemonics, used as evidence of a return to classical rhetoric, to the ars memoria of Cicero, Quintillian, and the pseudo-Cicero. It focuses on grammar, on the use of mnemonic prompts such as the circumstantiae to reveal a resurgence in classical training, on how to recollect. What it misses is a discussion on the act, not the art, of recollection itself, and those participating in it, the locus of the memories recalled and their relationship to the autobiographical self. Alexander Murray has identified the importance of memory/memories in confession, writing that confession is the discovery of a ‘historical world; the medium of its exploration, memory,’ recalling a highly Augustinian notion of memory as a topos that must be explored and searched. The locational aspect of classical rhetoric proves especially useful when discussing Augustinian memory, and its purpose, because Augustinian memory is profoundly locational. Augustine’s Confessions 10 positions memory as the habitus and dwelling place of not only God but of the individual herself; it is where God, and the self, can be found. The memoria of Confessions is introspective and deeply personal, it is autobiographical in that it holds within the summation of a person’s experiences, and it also allows her to abstract from these varied experiences to higher, theological considerations. It is in the completeness of memory that Augustinian theology and Aristotelian psychology can sit comfortably alongside each other; if Augustine’s memory contains everything, so too does Aristotelian memory, David Bloch argues, ‘constitut[ing] the life of an individual in general, providing it with coherence.’ Indeed, memory for Aristotle was character-building, tied to action: in his Nicomachean Ethics Book IX he intimates that those with happy memories are at peace, whilst those with wicked memories will be in a state of ‘constant internal discord.’ Importantly, good memories, Aristotle writes, give men hope.

A wind of change swept Western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The waterwheel gave rise to a minor industrial revolution. Innovations in agriculture meant that the efficiency of food production increased considerably; a side effect of which was that there were now more people who were not so tied to the land who had time to develop themselves in other ways, including scholarship. Towns grew and their populations became more literate. At the same time libraries were enlarged by mandate in the monasteries of the Cistercian and Carthusians; Fulda in Germany held two thousand volumes in the twelfth century. Perhaps even more important was the increase of libraries and book production in the major European cities and towns under the auspices of secular leaders. In the Church the creation of new religious orders reflected a heightened impulse to serve God by rebuilding churches and reinvigorating service to the laity. An innovation in clerical orders was born in the friar who took the idea of the monastic ecclesiastic out of the cloister and into the community in order to work for a Church that was seeking to be more laity facing.

I suggest, perhaps to my peril, that the above quotation has amounted to a rallying cry for various philosopher-scientists—as indeed one will describe those discussed herein—across a long and potentially dangerous period of time, and that the culmination of that newly-illumined period was the engendering of a ‘scientific’ tradition in the Latin West that may have grown into the systematic methodological naturalism many call ‘science’ today. Contemporary arguments surrounding the conceptual constitution of our study of the natural world is, however, far beyond the parameters of this chapter. Instead, one must make do with this chapter’s attempt to demonstrate how predominately Neo-Platonic thinkers simultaneously explicated the material world’s and humanity’s potentiality. Many of these thinkers, to slightly augment the scope of Willemien Otten’s Chartrian investigation ‘[had a] … desire to reveal the world as organically tied to its Maker [and that] provides the spark, so to speak, which sets the minds of these authors ablaze.’

Drawing on data provided by 207 Anglican and Methodist ministry training candidates, who completed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and an 80-item battery of type-related prayer preference items, this study tested the thesis advanced by Michael and Norrisey that the Apollonian (NF) Temperament is associated with Augustinian prayer and spirituality. From the battery of eighty items, the analysis identified eleven items rated more highly by NF participants. These items produced a scale with a satisfactory alpha of .81 (offering internal consistency reliability). Consideration of these items alongside the secondary literature on Augustinian spirituality, and Augustine’s own account in his Confessions, showed that they mapped broadly onto the characteristics of Augustinian prayer and spirituality (offering content validity). These data support the hypothesized link between the Apollonian (NF) Temperament and Augustinian prayer and spirituality.