Religious or spiritual struggles are clinically important to health care chaplains because they are related to poorer health outcomes, involving both mental and physical health problems. Identifying persons experiencing religious struggle poses a challenge for chaplains. One potentially underappreciated means of triaging chaplaincy effort are prayers written in chapel notebooks. We show that re...

A growing body of research documents the harmful effects of religious or spiritual struggle among patients with a wide variety of diagnoses. We developed a brief screening protocol for use in identifying patients who may be experiencing religious/spiritual struggle, as well as patients who would like a visit from a chaplain. We describe the results of a pilot study in which non-chaplain healthc...

Although moral reasoning is able to account for some of the variability in moral behavior, much remains unexplained. Recently, a number of components of personality have been proposed as bridging the gap between moral reasoning and moral behavior. The present study investigates the role that identity integration (the extent to which one’s moral values have become integrated into identity) and r...

This study measured the prevalence of religious self-disclosure in public MySpace profiles that belonged to a subsample of National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) wave 3 respondents (N=560). Personal attributes associated with religious identification as well as the overall quantity of religious self-disclosures are examined. A majority (62 percent) of profile owners identified their religi...

The objective of the present study is to investigate the use of religious/spiritual coping mechanisms in patients with chronic kidney disease undergoing hemodialysis, by means of interviews using a sociodemographic questionnaire and the religious/spiritual coping scale. Data analysis was performed using descriptive statistics and multiple linear regression. A total of 123 individuals were inter...

Similarity of religious beliefs and practices among friends, or network-religion autocorrelation, is a common aspect of many social networks. Network-religion autocorrelation is important because it strengthens plausibility structures (Berger 1967), or the combination of beliefs and strong social ties to others who share those beliefs. Plausibility structures support sacred umbrellas (Smith 199...

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...

Traditional religious knowledge widely incorporates traditional religious expressions and other forms of traditional knowledge, such as ecological knowledge, medicinal knowledge, elements of languages, and so on. Traditional religious knowledge is a subset of cultural heritage, of which the inheritance and spread have attracted considerable attention from the global society. A series of interna...

Recent evolutionary accounts seek to explain religious belief and behavior in terms of native cognitive dispositions and culturally transmitted innovations that have persisted because they have adaptive value. Despite the often vitriolic evolutionreligion debate, new evolutionary theories typically avoid challenging the truth of religious beliefs. In this paper we do three things. (1) We descri...