BACKGROUND While religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life, little is known about its relationship to ordinary belief at the level of the brain. Nor is it known whether religious believers and nonbelievers differ in how they evaluate statements of fact. Our lab previously has used functional neuroimaging to study belief as a general mode of cognition [1], and ot...

This paper examines the life stories of 14 men and women who spent time in religious communities and who subsequently took up work in the caring professions. Their accounts reflect the alignment between the ethics of care and those of religious life, the centrality of contemplation and self-examination to both Christianity and psychotherapy. There are further correspondences between their narra...

BACKGROUND Different environmental factors are thought to be responsible for 15-20% of schizophrenia pathogenesis. Religion has long been considered a major force in human life, regardless of economic, social or political affiliation. How the perception of religion has changed over time, especially in the context of mental illness, was the focal point of this long-term comparative study. SUBJ...

Examination of the extent to which women in the northern Israeli town of Tzfat recited psalms to cope with the stress of the Second Palestinian Intifada reveals that knowing someone who was killed in the Intifada, experiencing an income loss, and believing that Tzfat would be attacked by terrorists were strong predictors of psalm recitation among self-identified secular but not religious interv...

tolerance is among the issues about which very little experimental research has been conducted in the iranian society. in this study, based on a sample of 335 students, the relationship between degrees and types of religiosity with social tolerance has been examined. the results show that the more religious a person is, the less tolerance they show towards sexual issues, crime and relationship ...

Patrick McNamara has made a thoughtful and nuanced contribution to a growing field centered on questions concerning brain activity required for, and involved in, religious life. In a field spanning the disciplines of neuroscience and religious studies it is often hard to find a perspective that has been thoroughly developed on both frontiers for the obvious reason that both are so expansive. Bu...

The decline in religious identification and corresponding increase in the unaffiliated has been one of the most important religious changes in the United Kingdom (UK). The emergence of the “religious nones” is the most obvious sign of continuing secularization and the declining social and cultural relevance of religion. Yet while the religiously-unaffiliated often form the plurality — if not so...