Religious Conversion, Models and Paradigms

Religious experience: perspectives and research paradigms

The subject of religious experience has been marginalised in the social sciences. Although authors such as James (1903) have suggested that religious experience is pre-cultural and pre-cognitive, this paper argues against the perennialist position, suggesting instead that religious experience and its narration are both socially constructed. The ideological role of religious experience is discus...

Religious Conversion in Colonial Africa

Within economics, there has been a recent effort to better understand the notion of culture, typically defined as beliefs, values, and norms held by individuals. Empirical work has focused on identifying systematic cultural differences between individuals from different ethnic and national backgrounds. More recently, attention has turned to the historical origins of cultural differences (e.g., ...

The Neurophysiology of Religious Conversion Experiences

This paper explores various scientific studies and neurophysiological evidence that describe and authenticate the two main forms of religious conversion: progressive andinstantaneous. Progressive conversion experiences are thought to occur via the Stage Model and are explained by the emotional-cognitive processing theory, while instantaneous conversion experiences have been found to result from...

Models of Religious Authority

Parallel Programming Models and Paradigms

In the 1980s it was believed computer performance was best improved by creating faster and more e cient processors. This idea was challenged by parallel processing, which in essence means linking together two or more computers to jointly solve a computational problem. Since the early 1990s there has been an increasing trend to move away from expensive and specialized proprietary parallel superc...