Contemporary conflicts about secularity in ‘the West’ tend to focus on public space. Although collective Christian heritage means that space is rarely exclusively neutral, continue arise over the relationship between and religious symbolism, especially those symbols which derive from minorities. This contribution critically considers designation of as either sacred or secular political imaginar...

Galactic evolution is in transition from an early universe dominated by hierarchical clustering to a future dominated by secular processes. These result from interactions involving collective phenomena such as bars, oval disks, spiral structure, and triaxial dark halos. A detailed review is in Kormendy & Kennicutt (2004). This paper provides a summary illustrated in part with different galaxies...

In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter argues against the special legal status of religion, claiming that religion should not be the only ground for exemptions to the law and that this form of protection should be, in principle, available for the claims of secular conscience as well. However, in the last chapter of his book, he objects to a universal regime of exemptions for both religious and...

We tested the hypothesis that more frequent exposure to multiword phrases results in deeper entrenchment of their representations, by examining the performance of subjects of different religiosity in the recognition of briefly presented liturgical and secular phrases drawn from several frequency classes. Three of the sources were prayer texts that religious Jews are required to recite on a dail...

This study examines the intergenerational transmission of family religion as measured by parent's and adolescent's beliefs and practices in Buddhism, and its relation to delinquent behaviors among early adolescents in Thailand. The data set is from the Thai Family Matters Project 2007, a representative sample of 420 pairs of parents and teens in Bangkok. A structural equation model is employed ...

[1] We investigate the relationship between solar irradiance and cosmogenic isotope variations by simulating with a flux transport model the effect of solar activity on the Sun’s total and open magnetic flux. As the total amount of magnetic flux deposited in successive cycles increases, the polar fields build up, producing a secular increase in the open flux that controls the interplanetary mag...

We investigate the secular resonances for massless small bodies and Earth-like planets in several planetary systems. We further compare the results with those of Solar System. For example, in the GJ 876 planetary system, we show that the secular resonances ν1 and ν2 (respectively, resulting from the inner and outer giant planets) can excite the eccentricities of the Earth-like planets with orbi...

Although racial/ethnic differences have been found in the use of mental health services for depression in the general population, research among Veterans has produced mixed results. This study examined racial/ethnic differences in the use of mental health services among 148 Operation Enduring/Iraqi Freedom (OEF/OIF) Veterans with high levels of depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD...

A system of equations is derived for the secular motion of a hierarchic triple stellar system. Mean anomalies of the inner binary system and of the outer star orbit are eliminated up to order 9 in the ratio of their Delaunay momenta. Thanks to the use of vectorial elements (angular momenta and Laplace vectors) the equations are non-singular, compact, and independent on the choice of the referen...

Time-consuming and costly religious rituals pose a puzzle for economists committed to rational choice theories of human behavior. We propose that religious rituals promote in-group trust and cooperation that help to overcome collective-action problems. To test this hypothesis we design field experiments to measure the in-group cooperative behavior of members of religious and secular Israeli kib...