BACKGROUND Religious leaders are one of the key actors in the issue of female genital cutting (FGC) due to the influential position they have in the community and the frequent association of FGC with the religion. This study aimed to assess the knowledge and perspectives of the local religious leaders in Erbil governorate, Iraqi Kurdistan Region about different aspects of FGC. METHODS In-dept...

Race, Rationality, and Religion, and the US Jury in Civil Cases: What Does Love Have to Do With It? By Paul J. Zwier (An Essay for the Nootbaar Conference, Draft, Not for Citation March 9, 2017)1 The United States is the sole remaining common law jurisdiction that provides parties with the right to have facts in dispute in civil cases determined by a jury.2 This paper considers whether a religi...

There are religious and philosophical versions of the thesis that AIDS is a punishment for homosexual behaviour. It is argued here that the religious version is seriously incomplete. Because of this incompleteness and because of the indeterminacies that ordinarily attend religious argumentation, it is concluded that the claim may be set aside as unconvincing. Homosexual behaviour is then judged...

In 1908, the eminent British legal scholar F.W. Maitland declared that, “Religious liberty and religious equality are complete.”1 More recent scholarship has suggested that Maitland’s declaration may have been somewhat premature.2 But the last hundred years have witnessed the “demise” of Christianity as the “dominant ideology of our academic discourses.”3 And—at least on the surface—the situati...

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...