While Americans remain among the most religious in the industrialized world, it is widely observed that many of them exhibit cycles of religiosity, the most evident of which occurs in early adulthood. The young adult years of many Americans are marked by a clear decline in outward religious expression, which is widely thought to hit bottom during—and perhaps because of—the college experience. D...

This paper reports on the findings of a focus group study that examines how women have experienced menarche at the personal level and in relation to the larger cultural, religious, and societal environment. Fifty-three women from 34 different countries were recruited in 13 focus groups. On the one hand, at the personal level, menarche stories shared in this study revealed salient themes concern...

Research suggests that religiosity, or the importance of religion in one’s life, may be related to well-being, but little is known about how culture and genes may play a role in this relationship. Given that religion in a North American cultural context tends to emphasize social affiliation less than in an East Asian cultural context and that some people may be genetically predisposed to be mor...

Can a cultural memory and identity constructed around traumatic events in the historical past, interpreted as the result of pollution of the sacred center, give a group an evolutionary advantage under the right conditions? This article assesses this question by examining three different waves of religious entrepreneurship that drove the evolution of the ancient Israelite religion between the la...

The article provides a critical assessment of the more recent literature that relies on theoretical frameworks such as post modernism and globalization to deal with national identity, ethnicity and cultural mobility. Explaining sensitive and complicated issues such as identity requires the extensive use of the native historical, cultural and sociological sources related to the Iranian experienc...

Within economics, there has been a recent effort to better understand the notion of culture, typically defined as beliefs, values, and norms held by individuals. Empirical work has focused on identifying systematic cultural differences between individuals from different ethnic and national backgrounds. More recently, attention has turned to the historical origins of cultural differences (e.g., ...