Four weeks after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US combat troops began bombing missions over Afghanistan in Operation Enduring Freedom. Additional Reserve and National Guard personnel were called to active duty to support the war effort and to ensure security throughout the United States. All of these troops will require health care and assistance during and a...

The closing decades of the twentieth century witnessed a sharp transition in the grand themes that had provided the context for development thought and practice during the previous half century. The process of political decolonization was followed by concerns about the implications of the globalization of economic activity. The fall of the Berlin Wall, which signaled the end of the Cold War, el...

The popular image of Turkey as a secular, Westernized country gracefully bridging the divide between the traditional religious Middle East and modern Europe does not capture the full spectrum of Turkish society. Although Turkey may appear to have fully entered the modern Western world, the continued prevalence of honor killings and the patriarchal social structure that supports the practice tes...

The development of programme strategies for integration of HIV, food and nutrition activities in refugee settings Cover picture : WFP / Andrew Thorne-Lyman UNAIDS concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. The mention of specific companies or of certain manufacturers' products does not...

Underserved ethnic minorities have multiple chronic disease risk factors, including tobacco, alcohol and substance use, which contribute to increased incidence of stroke. Self-efficacy (self-care self-efficacy), religious participation and depression may directly and indirectly influence engagement in post stroke self-care behaviors. The primary aim of the present study was to investigate the e...

BACKGROUND The connection between religion/spirituality and deviance, like substance abuse, was first made by Durkheim who defined socially expected behaviors as norms. He explained that deviance is due in large part to their absence (called anomie), and concluded that spirituality lowers deviance by preserving norms and social bonds. Impairments in brain reward circuitry, as observed in Reward...

The doctrine that Christ is really present in the Eucharist appears to entail that Christ’s body is not only multiply located but present in different ways at different locations. Moreover, the doctrine poses an even more difficult metaquestion: what makes a theological explanation of the Eucharist a ‘real presence’ account? Aquinas’s defence of transubstantiation, perhaps the paradigmatic acco...

Religion is commonly defined as a set of rules, developed as part of a culture. Here we provide evidence that practice in following these rules systematically changes the way people attend to visual stimuli, as indicated by the individual sizes of the global precedence effect (better performance to global than to local features). We show that this effect is significantly reduced in Calvinism, a...

Chaplaincy Today • Volume 23 Number 2 • Autumn/Winter 2007 Medical practitioners and researchers continue to explore the association between spiritual/religious (SR) concerns and illness and medical care. Koenig et al. summarize over 1600 publications that describe this relationship. In a previous publication, we reported the statistically significant web of associations between the personal/pr...

Despite the millenniums-old tradition in Abrahamic circles of removing the foreskin of a penis at birth, the involuntary and aggressive practice of circumcision must not be made an exception to the natural, negative right to self-ownership—a birthright which should prevent a parent from physically harming a child from the moment of birth going forward. This paper will present a natural rights a...