Recent findings Studies indicate that religion and spirituality can promote mental health through positive religious coping, community and support, and positive beliefs. Research also shows that religion and spirituality can be damaging to mental health by means of negative religious coping, misunderstanding and miscommunication, and negative beliefs. Tools for the assessment of patients’ spiri...

Preventive health services, such as mammography, play an increasingly important role in maintaining women’s health. Social factors, such as religion, may influence utilization rates by expanding access, offering information, and increasing motivation. The current study examines the relationship between religious involvement, religious beliefs, and mammography usage in a nationally representativ...

D. D. Palmer's concept of innate intelligence was introduced to the fledgling chiropractic profession in 1904. 'It has been a source of division and derision to the profession since that time because of its religious content. Innate philosophy, although unique to chiropractic, was largely a refabrication of common turn-of-the century religious and philosophical beliefs. The origin and developme...

The aim of this paper is to expand upon the conclusions reached by Orr and Genesen in their 1997 article (published in this journal), Requests for 'inappropriate' treatment based on religious beliefs. Assuming, with Orr and Genesen, that claims made in the name of religion are not absolute, I will propose some principles for determining when claims based on religious beliefs or cultural sensibi...

Like David Silver before them, Erik Baldwin and Michael Thune argue that the facts of religious pluralism present an insurmountable challenge to the rationality of basic exclusive religious belief as construed by Reformed Epistemology. I will show that their argument is unsuccessful. First, their claim that the facts of religious pluralism make it necessary for the religious exclusivist to supp...

Van Leeuwen (2014) claims religious credences are not factual beliefs. He holds that while factual beliefs alone (i) guide behavior in all relevant practical settings, (ii) support inferences between religious credences and (iii) are evidentially vulnerable; religious credences instead (a) have a perceived normative orientation, (b) are open to free elaboration and (c) are vulnerable to special...