There has been a resurgence of interest in Mister Rogers, the person behind Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. The interest goes beyond stories of a famous television personality. There is a sense that Mister Rogers is needed today. U. S. culture is experiencing high levels of fear and anxiety, divisions and hostilities. Mister Rogers offers more than 'niceness' but a demanding theology. This theology offers tools for both diagnosing and treating our contemporary situation. Rogers believes that people have a need for acceptance and love, a vulnerability that is fundamental to our humanity. When this need is not met, people can turn in on themselves or lash out at others. Their fear can flow out into society and make it increasingly hostile. Rogers' treatment begins with the principle of specialness. People need to know that they are loved and accepted, and the affirmation of specialness meets this need. The principle also calls people to recognize the specialness in others, to love as they need to be loved. Rogers’ principle sets in motion a system of circulating love. Instead of unleashing hostility, Rogers' call to specialness unleashes empathy so more and more people are brought into the dynamics of love.

Dutch partitive constructions of the type one of the (few) X who Y show a striking pattern of singular subject-verb agreement in their relative clause. This paper presents a corpus study showing that the prescriptively “incorrect” singular agreement pattern is in fact the dominant pattern in Dutch. In order to explain this, we argue that this type of partitive construction often has a specific function in context, namely, to point out that the subject is special or extraordinary, usually for the reason presented by the relative clause. We apply a usage-based approach to this construction within the framework of Construction Grammar, arguing that the prevalent implicature of the subject’s specialness has become a conventionalized part of the meaning of the construction. This analysis then can be used to explain the syntactic pattern of singular agreement within the relative clause. A similar albeit less pronounced pattern can be found in German.*