Meaning and Religion: Exploring Mutual Implications

Religion and Neutrality: Myth, Principle, and Meaning

The moral meaning of religion for bioethics.

Religion's fundamental involvement with questions of disease, health, and medicine has given rise to concepts making substantial contributions to the field of bioethics. The purpose of this article is to examine such ongoing contributions in a general way, and then to review how the issue of whether medical technology should be used to prolong life might be approached from the standpoint of sev...

Religion and medicine IV: religion, physical health, and clinical implications.

In the fourth and final article of this religion and medicine series, I summarize the results of a comprehensive and systematic review of research examining religion's relationship to physical health and mortality. This review focuses on pain and disability, cardiovascular disease, immune and neuroendocrine function, susceptibility to infection, cancer, and overall mortality. I also explore wha...

Striving for the Sacred: Personal Goals, Life Meaning, and Religion

Religion invests human existence with meaning by establishing goals and value systems that potentially pertain to all aspects of a persons’ life. A goals approach provides a general unifying framework to capture the dynamic aspect of religion in people’s lives. Empirical research on the measurement of spirituality and religion through personal goals is described. To illustrate the application o...

Religion in meaning making and boundary work: theoretical explorations.

Based on the articles brought together for this special issue, this article proposes a transversal analysis and theoretical elaboration of the question of the uses of religious elements for meaning making and boundary work. In order to do so, we will first propose a sociocultural psychological perspective to examine meaning making dynamics. Second, we will apply a boundary work perspective, as ...