Pastoral Psychology is one of the oldest and most well established academic journals in the field of psychology and religion/spirituality. Since 1950, the journal offers an international interdisciplinary forum for the publication of original papers that discuss the work of caring for, understanding, and exploring human beings as persons, in families, in small groups, and in community. This pee...

BACKGROUND Assessing the cultural competence of medical students that have completed the curriculum provides indications on the effectiveness of cultural competence training in that curriculum. However, existing measures for cultural competence mostly rely on self-perceived cultural competence. This paper describes the outcomes of an assessment of knowledge, reflection ability and self-reported...

We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: (1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers and, simultaneously, (2) the spread of prosocial religions in the last 10-12 millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. We explai...

This qualitative study aims to document the identity experience of progressive gay Muslim men in a North American context. Six in-depth interviews, supplemented with participant observation, were conducted of gay Muslim men who attended an international conference for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning (LGBTQ) Muslims. For progressive gay Muslims such as these, a Muslim iden...

Understanding how businesses function in relation to cultural and societal influences is critical for today’s business leader who wants to interact competently across borders. However, developing and evaluating such competence is a challenge. One concept that provides a holistic conceptualization of intercultural competence is the notion of “mindfulness” or the ability to use reflection as a co...

The movement of people from one country to another and the subsequent settling of migrants in host communities diversely affect all parties in relocation processes. Directly or indirectly, both migrant and their host communities respond differently to the worldviews of the migrants and the socio-cultural contexts of the host communities. While the religious beliefs of people appear to be the le...

A range of socio-economic, cultural, and religious factors influence patterns of and responses to suicide in the Asian countries involved in the Strategies to Prevent Suicide (STOPS) project. As a general rule, suicide rates are highest among relatively more prosperous countries, particularly those which have developed rapidly. Within these countries, suicide rates are highest for sub-groups th...

this paper aimed to investigate the differences between english and persian religious elements which may be problematic in translating from english into persian. the study aimed also to investigate the way cultural elements in general and religious ones in particular were dealt with in the selected corpora and to check whether the procedures proposed by newmark, were sufficient and adequate for...

Culture may particularly influence community attitudes towards mental illness, when the illness itself is shaped by a cultural context. To explore the influence of culture-specific, religious symptoms on Orthodox Jewish community attitudes, the authors compared the attitudes of 169 Orthodox Jews, who randomly viewed one of two vignettes describing either religious or nonreligious obsessive–comp...

This article adds to recent literature in the study of religion and marriage by examining older couples’ use of religion as a cultural repertoire in enduring marriages. The study includes qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with 43 married, Christian couples. Couples reported four predominant social contexts that gave sacred meanings to their marriage: prayer, worship services and sermo...