Service learning pedagogy often assumes a variety of forms when connected with classroom teaching. Through a creative use of service learning pedagogy, the author constructs learning designs that foster student engagement with course content and prompts interrelated connections between the subjects and their own service learning experiences. The author highlights the importance of setting a context for service learning through creating activities linked to learning goals, integrating service learning components with classroom teaching methods, and proactively engaging student apathy, resistance, and faith perspectives through specific assignments that combine experience, analysis, and subject matter. The course described in this essay directly contributed to the author's receiving the 2004 Fortress Press Award for Undergraduate Teaching.

This article examines the relationships between adornment, gender and honour in the Graeco-Roman world in order to provide a broad context for understanding the attempts to curtail women's adornment in 1 Tim 2.9 and 1 Pet 3.3. It argues that while many male writers criticize women who adorn themselves, often accusing such women of luxuria, not all women shared such a perspective. Rather, women may well have valued jewellery, fine clothes and elaborate hair as means of conveying status and honour, and as important forms of economic power. These factors require consideration when attempting to understand why the authors of 1 Timothy and 1 Peter counsel women to avoid gold, pearls, braided hair and fine clothing.

This guide introduces readers to some of the primary and secondary literature on clothing and adornment in antiquity, spanning ancient near eastern contexts to those of early Christianity. In particular, the discussion examines the social roles of these phenomena, including how they can function as symbols of power, status and honor. Gender issues also come to the fore, as women’s dress faces increasing scrutiny by male writers.

This article joins recent studies of the letter of James in arguing that the ancient system of patronage aids in illuminating the social situation of this short text. However, unlike other authors, I suggest that God is not understood as a substitute patron in James, but as an ideal benefactor, on whom the audience must rely. Building on the work of Stephan Joubert and others, the article first offers evidence that patronage and benefaction were understood as different relationships in parts of the Roman Empire. Subsequently it focuses on sections of James in which patronage is criticized and God is portrayed as a frank friend and benefactor, consistent with the image of the ideal benefactor in antiquity.

This article employs George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's work on metaphor (1980) to examine the current use of the term "learning outcomes" within higher education. It argues that "learning outcomes" is an ontological metaphor (education becomes focused on results that one can understand and measure) that resonates with contemporary academic capitalism. Yet because metaphors highlight some things and conceal others, thinking about teaching and disciplines using "learning outcomes" hides other dimensions of academic capitalism and obscures unquantifiable and highly complex aspects of education. Finally, the article explores ways in which an emphasis upon outcomes has consequences for the field of Religious Studies.