Rodney Stark (2002) has sought to explain the greater religiosity of women, something that he asserts to be a cultural and historical universal, by suggesting that male physiology makes males more impulsive and so less likely to submit to religious prohibitions. Although he presents evidence suggesting that greater female religiosity is true today cross-culturally, he presents no real evidence ...

In the absence of immortality, the human species has over the millennia developed rites and rituals to help in the passing of life to honor the person who is dying or has died or in some way demonstrate their "courage" and perseverance as well as duty even in the face of almost certain death. The centuries-old traditions of the gathering of loved ones, the chanting of prayers, the ritual religi...

From the time of ancient civilizations the pedagogy has been considered not only as a method for 'transmission of knowledge' but also for building the moral behaviour of a society (Pradhan, 2002: 29). Since its inception the teaching or pedagogy was very much concerned for the transmission of the religious, philosophical and moral traditions from one generation to the next (Pradhan, ibid; Agarw...

The aim of this speculative paper, rooted in a variety of concepts derived from social anthropology, theology, and the history of religion, is to develop the broad notion of spirituality in terms of what might be called cultural wisdom. This I do alongside a discussion of the human proclivity for meaning-making understood as a process expressed in numerous religious traditions as 'salvation'. T...

This Special Edition includes articles discussing the many alternatives to various forms of theism found among majority religious and some philosophical traditions [...]

As is made clear at the outset, he by no means wanted to deny the existence of discernible points of contact betwe(!n distinct religious 193 traditions; the study of parallels, in his view, is valid and should be encouraged. His criticisms were directed, rather, at what he saw to be misuses of this kind of comparative study. These misuses fall generally into two categories. The first of these c...

Abstract Recent expansion of alternative frameworks for archaeological interpretation, particularly non-Western ones, provides an opportunity to revisit and challenge orthodox narratives in the discipline. The Melanesian concept kastom a framework understand contradictions arising from selective nature colonial-era culture change. One facet these transitions is widespread adoption integration C...

This article examines the independence of Indonesian Constitutional Court in relation to religious issues, particularly regarding freedom and marriage regulations. Utilizing a socio-legal approach, analyzes five judgments assesses whether accommodates aspirations majority while still maintaining neutrality. Results show that Court's legal decisions tend accommodate societal aspirations, but thi...

Freedom of religion had been assured since World War II in Japan. This entails that people have rights to select their own religion without any political pressure and that their faith and practices should be esteemed. It is indeed true that they are liberated from any religious restriction. There are, however, still some limitations or challenges Christians experience in the Japanese context to...

"Each one of us has two heritages, a "vertical" one that comes to us from our ancestors, our religious community and our popular traditions, and a "horizontal" one transmitted to us by our contemporaries and by the age we live in. It seems to me that the latter is the more influential of the two, and that it becomes more so every day. Yet this fact is not reflected in our perception of ourselve...