Who is Jesus? Reflections on S. Endo\u27s A Life of Jesus

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. Shusaku Endo was a Japanese author born in Tokyo in 1923. He was raised by his single mother who became a fervent believer in Christianity. With her influence, Endo himself was baptized by the age of twelve. Having grown up in Japan, Endo was obviously very knowledgeable about Japanese religion and customs and most especially Japanese ideals. He claimed that “the Japanese have a traditional saying to the effect that the four most dreadful things on the earth are fire, earthquakes, thunderbolts, and fathers” (4). Obviously, as this quote illustrates, the image of a strict father is not very appealing to the Japanese; instead, according to Endo, the Japanese prefer the image of a maternal figure. This is precisely why, Endo argues, that the Christian religion is such a minority in Japan. Because God has always been depicted as a stern father in western cultures, Christianity has never caught on in Japan. So to help his Japanese audience better understand his beloved religion, Shusaku Endo wrote the novel called A Life of Jesus. To accomplish this purpose, Endo depicted God and Jesus in a very different way from which western readers are used to seeing. Because the Japanese identify more with the maternal side of things and are more “responsive to one who „suffers with [them]‟”, Endo decided to depict God as a caring maternal figure and Jesus as a man who had such great love that he was willing to die even for those who did not yet believe (1). In this way Endo is able to greatly bring out the humanity of Jesus. When A Life of Jesus is read with this perspective in mind, it makes a lot more sense in terms of the arguments made, the type of soft language used, and the tear jerking metaphors presented. Overall, this book serves its purpose, which is to present and in a way to “sell” Christianity to a Japanese based audience who know very little, if anything, about Jesus

Y2K Interruption: Can the Doomsday Scenario Be Averted?

The management philosophy until recent years has been to replace the workers with computers, which are available 24 hours a day, need no benefits, no insurance and never complain. But as the year 2000 approached, along with it came the fear of the millennium bug, generally known as Y2K, and the computers threatened to strike!!!! Y2K, though an abbreviation of year 2000, generally refers to the computer glitches which are associated with the year 2000. Computer companies, in order to save memory and money, adopted a voluntary standard in the beginning of the computer era that all computers automatically convert any year designated by two numbers such as 99 into 1999 by adding the digits 19. This saved enormous amount of memory, and thus money, because large databases containing birth dates or other dates only needed to contain the last two digits such as 65 or 86. But it also created a built in flaw that could make the computers inoperable from January 2000. The problem is that most of these old computers are programmed to convert 00 (for the year 2000) into 1900 and not 2000. The trouble could therefore, arise when the systems had to deal with dates outside the 1900s. In 2000, for example a programme that calculates the age of a person born in 1965 will subtract 65 from 00 and get -65. The problem is most acute in mainframe systems, but that does not mean PCs, UNIX and other computing environments are trouble free. Any computer system that relies on date calculations must be tested because the Y2K or the millennium bug arises because of a potential for “date discontinuity” which occurs when the time expressed by a system, or any of its components, does not move in consonance with real time. Though attention has been focused on the potential problems linked with change from 1999 to 2000, date discontinuity may occur at other times in and around this period.

The Economics of Stateless Nations: Sovereign Debt and Popular Well-being in Pakistan

The Government of Pakistan believes that “high and growing” indebtedness of the government is reflected in falling investment and growth rates of the economy, leading to growing poverty of the people. This paper examines how this came to be, and whether the connections implicit in this assessment do in fact exist? On this basis, the paper also comments on the efficacy of some current policy proposals. The conventional wisdom is that “persistent fiscal and balance of payments deficits are a fundamental source of Pakistan’s high debt burden” [Pakistan (2001), p. xv)].1 The State Bank of Pakistan (2001, p. 117) goes further: “This…public debt is the result of structural weaknesses in the domestic economy and the external account. Excessive government expenditures, stagnant tax revenues, high returns on government securities and inappropriate sequencing of financial reforms, led to a bludgeoning (sic.) domestic debt profile. On the external front, large current account deficits, stagnant export revenues and declining worker (sic.) remittances, effectively forced Pakistan into an unsustainable situation”. All this is true, but hardly exhaustive.

An historical analysis of multifaith cooperation and civilisation building in India during Muslim rule

India has always been a multi-cultural, multi-racial and multi-religious melting pot of diverse civilizations since ancient times, readily absorbing diverse beliefs, customs, religions and philosophies, not viewing them as existential ‘problems’ like modern nations but rather glorying in the everlasting unity of the diverse elements that comprise India’s multifarious and eclectic beauty. Islam was the third major cultural development in India (after Hinduism and Buddhism), initially arriving with Arab trading communities around the coastal ports and later with the Muslim conquest of Sind, which set the scene for successive Islamic polities throughout India, whereby foreign and indigenous Muslim rulers adapted the ethics and laws of Islam to the welfare of their subjects, granting minorities (and Hindu-Buddhist majorities in many cases) the freedom to practice their religions, which enriched religious, cultural and scientific life in the Subcontinent and led to a massive Indian contribution to Islam itself. This paper sheds light on the attitudes and policies of Muslim rulers in their engagement with the diverse religious groups in the country and examines the challenges in the execution of multifaith cooperation in building a harmonious and sustainable civilization based on equality and justice. Multifiath relationships embody the notion of mutual understanding and respect for the beliefs and practices of others. In the modern globalised world with its increasing political and economic dissension, peaceful coexistence among peoples of different religious beliefs can prove to be the way forward for peace and prosperity and became a role model for contemporary world. The glorious past of Indian multifaith cooperation under historical Muslim governments is a glittering example of the potential of genuinely inclusive cultural and religious cooperation, as manifest in the unique Ganga-Jamuni Tehzib (Ganges-Jamuna culture), a synergy of Hindu-Muslim cultural elements that flourishes in the regions of Awadh and southern India

Gender Discrimination and Job Satisfaction

This article defines the relationship between two factors and its impact by examining the effect of Gender discrimination in the work place which influences the job performance and job satisfaction in individuals(i.e.; hiring, promotion, salary, control/ autonomy/ influence, challenge, performance measures, feed back, in strumentality, stability/security). The data is collected through quantitative method. The sample of thestudy consisted of 500 employees working in different bank in Islamabad and Wahcantt (Pakistan) through the questionnaire, of which 300 were returned and processed. R was used to analysis the data, using independent T-Test, and excel, Correlation and Multi-regression analysis. There is a significant prove, gender discrimination has an influence on Job satisfaction and job performance and stability of individuals. From findings of the study, it is also depicted that male and female have significantly different level of job satisfaction

Modelling of radio wave propagation using Finite Element Analysis.

Fourth generation (4G) wireless communication systems are intended to support high data rates which requires careful and accurate modelling of the radio environment. In this thesis, for the first time finite clement based accurate and computationally efficient models of wave propagation in different outdoor and indoor environments has been developed. Three different environments were considered: the troposphere, vegetation and tunnels and wave propagation in these environments were modelled using finite element analysis. Use of finite elements in wave propagation modelling is a novel idea although many propagation models and approaches were used in past. Coverage diagrams, path loss contours and power levels were calculated using developed models in the troposphere, vegetation and tunnels. Results obtained were compared with commercially available software Advanced Refractive Effects Prediction Software (AREPS) to validate the accuracy of the developed approach and it is shown that results were accurate with an accuracy of 3dB. The developed models were very flexible in handling complex geometries and similar analysis can be easily extended to other environments. A fully vectored finite element base propagation model was developed for straight and curved tunnels. An optimum range of values of different electrical parameters for tunnels of different shapes has been derived. The thesis delivered a novel approach to modelling radio channels that provided a fast and accurate solution of radio wave propagation in realistic environments. The results of this thesis will have a great impact in modelling and characterisation of future wireless communication systems

EFFICIENT DYNAMIC ADDRESSING BASED ROUTING FOR UNDERWATER WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

This thesis presents a study about the problem of data gathering in the inhospitable underwater environment. Besides long propagation delays and high error probability, continuous node movement also makes it difficult to manage the routing information during the process of data forwarding. In order to overcome the problem of large propagation delays and unreliable link quality, many algorithms have been proposed and some of them provide good solutions for these issues, yet continuous node movements still need attention. Considering the node mobility as a challenging task, a distributed routing scheme called Hop-by-Hop Dynamic Addressing Based (H2- DAB) routing protocol is proposed where every node in the network will be assigned a routable address quickly and efficiently without any explicit configuration or any dimensional location information. According to our best knowledge, H2-DAB is first addressing based routing approach for underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) and not only has it helped to choose the routing path faster but also efficiently enables a recovery procedure in case of smooth forwarding failure. The proposed scheme provides an option where nodes is able to communicate without any centralized infrastructure, and a mechanism furthermore is available where nodes can come and leave the network without having any serious effect on the rest of the network. Moreover, another serious issue in UWSNs is that acoustic links are subject to high transmission power with high channel impairments that result in higher error rates and temporary path losses, which accordingly restrict the efficiency of these networks. The limited resources have made it difficult to design a protocol which is capable of maximizing the reliability of these networks. For this purpose, a Two-Hop Acknowledgement (2H-ACK) reliability model where two copies of the same data packet are maintained in the network without extra burden on the available resources is proposed. Simulation results show that H2-DAB can easily manage during the quick routing changes where node movements are very frequent yet it requires little or no overhead to efficiently complete its tasks