Towards a New Paradigm of Religious Organizations

Abstract  In contemporary Japan, religion is an important issue. Various types of religions such as new religions, occultism, the new age movement, traditional religions etc., attract supporters and exerts a favorable influence on certain aspects of their lives. But, such circumstances are not restricted to Japan. All over the world today, religions have the power to sway national policy and are indispensable in influencing human consciousness and behavior.
Religion is alive and influential even in the secularized world. As such, a cross-cultural study of religions is increasingly needed. Furthermore, the typology of religious organizations provides a means with which to make a comparative study of religion throughout the world.
However, we cannot help but conclude that the theoretical framework developed so far cannot sufficiently deal with the subject in question. This is primarily due to its strong bias towards Christianity, which renders it invalid for analyzing religions in non-Christian regions. This paper will focus on the "cult". The term cult, unlike church-sect-denomination, seems to be applicable to any religious tradition and culture. It is not confined to a specific one such as the Christian tradition and culture.
It should be noted that the cult as previously treated is problematic, too, because it is not free from a bias towards Christianity, and has too negative a connotation for a scientific concept. In this paper, utilizing the merits of the concept of cult, I would like to elaborate a new paradigm of religious organizations. This should allow for a cross-cultural comparison between religious phenomena.     

Toward general impossibility theorems in pure exchange economies

We study the possibility of strategy-proof and efficient mechanisms in pure exchange economies. In his remarkable paper, Zhou (1991) establishes an elegant impossibility result: there is no strategy-proof, efficient, and non-dictatorial mechanism in the two-agent case. He conjectures that there is no strategy-proof, efficient, and “non-inversely-dictatorial” mechanism in the case of three or more agents. However, we discover some counterexamples to his conjecture in the case of four or more agents. We present a new interesting open question: Is there any strategy-proof, efficient, and “non-alternately-dictatorial” mechanism? Received: 17 October 2000/Accepted: 20 April 2001     

Gender,education and training: an international perspective

This article examines the causes and consequences of sex discrimination in education in developing countries and considers whether the available educational structures improve gender equity or reinforce the status quo. After an introduction that distinguishes between "education" and "schooling" and identifies schooling as a means of patriarchal control, the article sketches the growing awareness of gender disparities in education. The next section describes how gender inequality in education leads to low participation of women in the labor market and limits women's access to information and services, to mobility, and to decision-making. The article then reviews the international agenda on promoting female education that has resulted in donor-driven initiatives arising from such events as the 1990 World Conference on Education For All. A look at the benefits of educating women then focuses on the "family welfare" perspective and the acknowledgement of women's full socioeconomic role. After pointing to the slow progress towards gender equity in education, the article discusses barriers to this goal posed by poverty, social conventions, early marriage, violence in schools, and curricular gender stereotyping. The article then considers problems encountered by efforts to provide informal education and training and the fact that educational initiatives are donor-driven and fail to address the causes of the gender gap. It is concluded that governments and donors must transform schools as part of a larger program of socioeconomic reforms designed to improve women's status.     

The Evolution of the Temporary Protection Visa Regime in Australia

While the Temporary Protection Visa (TPV) regime was formally introduced in October 1999 by the Howard Government, the concept of temporary protection was not totally alien to the Australian humanitarian landscape. Earlier examples reflected a standard use of temporary protection as a complementary or interim protection mechanism, offering short‐term group‐based protection where individual assessment under the 1951 Convention was both impractical and untimely. This paper focuses on the wider and more controversial changes in the use of temporary protection mechanisms that were to follow with the introduction of the TPV in 1999, which offered substitute protection for individually assessed Convention refugees who had arrived onshore without valid travel documents. It examines the history and evolution of the TPV policy regime from 1999 to the announcement of its abolition in 2008, arguing that the introduction and subsequent development of the policy may be understood as a product of a conservative, exclusionist political climate in Australia, following the unprecedented impact of the populist One Nation party in 1998, and later, the impact of September 11th. It also examines later amendments to the regime as a response to growing domestic disquiet about the impacts of the policy, and the abolition of the TPV policy under a new Australian government elected in late 2007.     

A women's support group for Asian international students

International students underuse counseling services, which are grounded in Western cultural values. The authors describe a support group for Asian international students that they launched at a large midwestern university to help students feel at ease with American university life, address homesickness, language problems, and academic and social stressors. Co-leaders created a safe and culturally sensitive atmosphere where the women could network, socialize, and address their issues. Group treatment offers many advantages over individual counseling and can enhance the health of international students.     

Secondary Traumatization Among Adult Children of PTSD Veterans: The Role of Mother–Child Relationships

The study examined the level of secondary traumatization among adult children of Israeli war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as manifested in emotional distress, stress resulting from terrorist attacks, and capacity for intimacy. In addition, the role of the mother–child relationship as a moderator of these manifestations of distress was examined. Forty-six adult children of fathers with chronic PTSD, and 46 adult children of fathers who had participated in a war but did not have PTSD participated. Findings revealed that adult children of PTSD veterans showed higher levels of psychological distress, greater terror-related stress, and a lower capacity for intimacy than children of non-PTSD veterans. Positive relationship with the mother was found to moderate the level of participants' capacity for intimacy and their levels of psychiatric symptoms.     

A critical disjuncture? The culmination of post-World War II socio-demographic and economic trends in the United States

This essay examines the consequences of major social, demographic and economic trends in the United States since World War II. These include rising women’s employment, the ‘Baby Boom’, the outlines of the so-called ‘new’ immigration, the increasing racial and ethnic diversity deriving from that immigration, the economic contexts in which recent US immigration has occurred, and recent technologically-induced features of global work flows that will condition immigration’s future reception and effects. Women’s wartime work experiences, together with their economic opportunities in the ensuing decades, boosted married women’s autonomy and domestic leverage. Rising economic prosperity encouraged marriage and family formation even as growing employment among married women of childbearing age made having and taking care of large families more difficult. World War II also spawned the expansion of migration to the United States, which in turn converted the country from a largely biracial society with a sizable white majority and a small black minority into a multiracial, multiethnic society with greater racial and ethnic boundary crossing and increasingly blurred colour lines. A major issue is whether currently changing economic conditions and social institutions will support and strengthen such tendencies or instead weaken them. Without robust job growth, the demographic legacy of the baby boom, which now involves ever-rising numbers of retired people, will be more difficult to support, especially given the country’s current fiscal deficits. Greater earnings inequality and weak job growth may also poison the climate for further immigration to the US, thus diminishing the chance that newcomers can continue contributing to the dissolution of fault lines among racial-ethnic groups and to the resolution of periodic labour shortages.