This essay explores religion’s need for law, comparing the story told in Mitra Sharafi’s Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia (2014)—about the virtual hijacking of British colonial law to serve the communal religious needs of Parsis in colonial India—to other contexts in which secular and religious legal systems have built symbiotic relationships, including in the United States and Thailand....

This research is qualitative using a life story approach. The informants of this study were seven Indonesian Muslim women and one Christian who married Japanese man living in Japan. analyzes how religious identity negotiated the marriages men women. previous three people Indonesia. prior indicates that all husbands follow religion their wives. finds husbands, before marriage, Still, after some ...

Although the positive association between religiosity and life satisfaction is well documented, much theoretical and empirical controversy surrounds the question of how religion actually shapes life satisfaction. Using a new panel dataset, this study offers strong evidence for social and participatory mechanisms shaping religion’s impact on life satisfaction. Our findings suggest that religious...

Religious marketplace research has focused on the relative success strict religious groups have had in maintaining their members. This paper looks at why this might be by focusing on individuals who leave these groups. Defectors from fundamentalist religious groups undergo an identity transformation process through which their understanding of the world and themselves is changed. This paper det...