Humility

2018 ◽  
pp. 62-80
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Bilbro

When faced with moral or environmental problems, the industrial culture searches for a set of rules that can guide us through a messy reality. Yet these codes arrogantly foreclose a complex reality and provide a false assurance of propriety; as such, they are ways of keeping the self buffered. Berry, following thinkers such as Ivan Illich and Charles Taylor, turns to the parable of the Good Samaritan for insight into the embodied, humble forms of love that would characterize a truly sustainable community. His essays practice such humility not by being deferential or meek, but by recognizing that the human condition requires us to choose and act from a position of irremediable ignorance. Worse still, we humans generally don’t act on the basis of our most careful, rational thought, but on a more gut level. The occasional, ad hoc nature of his essays evinces his efforts to walk along what he terms a “way of ignorance,” a way of approaching reality in light of our condition as finite persons. In addition, many of Berry’s essays are structured by binaries—boomers versus stickers, the industrial economy versus the Kingdom of God—that work to pry open the codes we use to foreclose reality.

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Kate Zebiri

This article aims to explore the Shaykh-mur?d (disciple) or teacher-pupil relationship as portrayed in Western Sufi life writing in recent decades, observing elements of continuity and discontinuity with classical Sufism. Additionally, it traces the influence on the texts of certain developments in religiosity in contemporary Western societies, especially New Age understandings of religious authority. Studying these works will provide an insight into the diversity of expressions of contemporary Sufism, while shedding light on a phenomenon which seems to fly in the face of contemporary social and religious trends which deemphasize external authority and promote the authority of the self or individual autonomy.


Author(s):  
Rinkle Chhabra ◽  
Anuradha Saini

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) are autonomous, infrastructure less and self-configuring networks. MANETs has gained lots of popularity due to on the fly deployment i.e. small network setup time and ability to provide communication in obstreperous terrains. Major challenges in MANETs include routing, energy efficiency, network topology control, security etc. Primary focus in this article is to provide method and algorithm to ensure significant energy savings using re-configurable directional antennas. Significant energy gains can be clinched using directional antenna. Key challenges while using directional antenna are to find destination location, antenna focusing, signal power and distance calculations. Re-configurable directional antenna can ensure significant energy gains if used intelligently. This article provides a brief insight into improved energy savings using re-configurable directional antennas and an associated algorithm


2009 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-119
Author(s):  
Matthias Bickenbach

Eine der zentralen Fragen moderner Poetik ist, wie der Werkentstehungsprozeß von kreativer Materialfülle zur ästhetischen Bestimmtheit des Erzählten als autonomem Kunstwerk übergeht. Sten Nadolnys Poetikvorlesung gibt überraschende Einsichten in die Selbstorganisation von Steuerungsbewegungen, die noch unterhalb der Ebene des Schreibens liegen und die als Theorie der Eigenwerte in der Literatur herauszustellen ist. One of the central questions in modern poetics is, how literary writing proceeds from the creative richness of its material to an aesthetic determination as autonomous art. Sten Nadolnys lectures on his poetics enable an astonishing insight into the self-organisation of operations beyond writing, which can be considered as a theory of self-values in literature.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph John Pyne Simons ◽  
Ilya Farber

Not all transit users have the same preferences when making route decisions. Understanding the factors driving this heterogeneity enables better tailoring of policies, interventions, and messaging. However, existing methods for assessing these factors require extensive data collection. Here we present an alternative approach - an easily-administered single item measure of overall preference for speed versus comfort. Scores on the self-report item predict decisions in a choice task and account for a proportion of the differences in model parameters between people (n=298). This single item can easily be included on existing travel surveys, and provides an efficient method to both anticipate the choices of users and gain more general insight into their preferences.


Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.


Author(s):  
Israel Escudero-Castillo ◽  
Fco. Javier Mato-Díaz ◽  
Ana Rodriguez-Alvarez

As a consequence of the Spring 2020 lockdown that occurred in Spain due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many people lost their jobs or had to be furloughed. The objective of this study is to analyse the influence of the latter changes in labour market status on psychological well-being. For this purpose, an ad-hoc questionnaire featuring socio-demographic and mental health criteria was created. Granted that the pandemic can be viewed as an exogenous shock, the bias caused by the bidirectional problems between the work situation and mental well-being can be tackled. Results indicate that the lockdown exerted a greater negative effect on the self-perceived well-being of unemployed and furloughed persons than on those in employment. Moreover, among those in continuous employment, teleworkers experienced a lesser degree of self-perceived well-being post lockdown as compared to those people remaining in the same work location throughout the COVID-19 crisis. Finally, the lockdown provoked worse effects on the self-perceived well-being of women as compared to men, a result that appears to be related to gender differences in household production. In conclusion, these results could be especially relevant given that the evolution of the pandemic is having ongoing effects on employment and, therefore, on the mental health of workers.


2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alhagi Marong ◽  
Chernor Jalloh

AbstractThis article argues that Liberia owes a duty under both international humanitarian and human rights law to investigate and prosecute the heinous crimes, including torture, rape and extra-judicial killings of innocent civilians, committed in that country by the warring parties in the course of fourteen years of brutal conflict. Assuming that Liberia owes a duty to punish the grave crimes committed on its territory, the article then evaluates the options for prosecution, starting with the possible use of Liberian courts. The authors argue that Liberian courts are unable, even if willing, to render credible justice that protects the due process rights of the accused given the collapse of legal institutions and the paucity of financial, human and material resources in post-conflict Liberia. The authors then examine the possibility of using international accountability mechanisms, including the International Criminal Court, an ad hoc international criminal tribunal as well as a hybrid court for Liberia. For various legal and political reasons, the authors conclude that all of these options are not viable. As an alternative, they suggest that because the Special Court for Sierra Leone has already started the accountability process for Liberia with the indictment of Charles Taylor in 2003, and given the close links between the Liberian and Sierra Leonean conflicts, the Special Court would be a more appropriate forum for international prosecutions of those who perpetrated gross humanitarian and human rights law violations in Liberia.


Author(s):  
Xianjie Yang ◽  
Sayed Nassar

In an effort to establish a theoretical outline of a criterion for preventing the vibration-induced loosening of preloaded threaded fasteners, this paper provides an experimental and analytical insight into the effect of the initial bolt preload and the excitation amplitude on the self loosening performance of cap screw fastener. A nonlinear model is used for predicting the clamp load loss caused by the vibration-induced loosening of cap screw fasteners under cyclic transverse loading. Experimental verification was conducted on the twisting torque variation and the effect of the preload level and transverse displacement amplitude. Comparison of the experimental and analytical results on the clamp load loss with the number of cycles verifies that the proposed model accurately predicts self-loosening performance.


2004 ◽  
Vol 2004 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mourad Elhabiri ◽  
Josef Hamacek ◽  
Jean-Claude G. Bünzli ◽  
Anne-Marie Albrecht-Gary

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-49
Author(s):  
Paul Kucharski

My aim in this essay is to advance the state of scholarly discussion on the harms of genocide. The most obvious harms inflicted by every genocide are readily evident: the physical harm inflicted upon the victims of genocide and the moral harm that the perpetrators of genocide inflict upon themselves. Instead, I will focus on a kind of harm inflicted upon those who are neither victims nor perpetrators, on those who are outside observers, so to speak. My thesis will be that when a whole community or culture is eliminated, or even deeply wounded, the world loses an avenue for insight into the human condition. My argument is as follows. In order to understand human nature, and that which promotes its flourishing, we must certainly study individual human beings. But since human beings as rational and linguistic animals are in part constituted by the communities in which they live, the study of human nature should also involve the study of communities and cultures—both those that are well ordered and those that are not. No one community or culture has expressed all that can be said about the human way of existing and flourishing. And given that the unity and wholeness of human nature can only be glimpsed in a variety of communities and cultures, then part of the harm of genocide consists in the removal of a valuable avenue for human beings to better understand themselves.


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