We tested the hypothesis that more frequent exposure to multiword phrases results in deeper entrenchment of their representations, by examining the performance of subjects of different religiosity in the recognition of briefly presented liturgical and secular phrases drawn from several frequency classes. Three of the sources were prayer texts that religious Jews are required to recite on a dail...

Do political-Islamic elites need to be democrats for participation in democracy, how do their values compare to secular elites’, and how do their values change through participation and affect democratization itself? A comparative-systematic content analysis of three Islamic-conservative and two pro-secular Turkish newspapers over nine years shows that, overall, political-Islamic elites adopt d...

Religious politics, in which there is a dominant cleavage separating believers (especially if literalist) from moderate believers and nonbelievers is important in Muslim countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Will Muslim societies become secular or continue to become more religious? Within the religious majority, are Islamists (supporters of Shari’a Law) more fertile than non-Islamist M...

To cover a wider variety of specific aspects of spirituality, which are of relevance also in secular societies, the ASP (“Aspects of Spirituality”) questionnaire was developed. While it was used so far with healthy adults and with adolescents living in a secular society, it was meanwhile used also with Polish students who were predominantly Catholic. Here we compare the factorial structure of t...

Atheists are distrusted in societies with religious majorities. However, relatively little is known about the underlying reasons for this phenomenon. Previous evidence suggests that distrust of atheists is in part the result of believers thinking that being under supernatural surveillance by a watchful God underlies moral behavior. However, secular rule of law, including institutions such as po...

This article analyzes the politics of preaching in Turkey in the last decade by focusing on the appointment of women as preachers and vice-muftis by the Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), a state institution established for the protection of secular foundations through religious service. It asks what happens when women wearing headscarves become civil servants and give religious...

In the Netherlands young Muslim women have increasingly begun to join women-only kickboxing gyms. Dutch public discourse has taken notice, treating this phenomenon as a surprising development. The general assumption, in and western Europe more broadly, is that women's sport form of secular, feminist empowerment; participation thus exemplifies incongruence Islam with modern, secular nation-state...

Previous studies suggest that religious prayer can alter the experience of pain via expectation mechanisms. While brain processes related to other types of top-down modulation of pain have been studied extensively, no research has been conducted on the potential effects of active religious coping. Here, we aimed at investigating the neural mechanisms during pain modulation by prayer and their d...

Several authors have argued that religious beliefs are a way of communicating commitment and loyalty to other group members. The advantage of commitment signals is that they can promote intragroup cooperation by overcoming the free-rider problems that plague most cooperative pursuits. In this article, the author tests this idea using a database on 19th century utopian communes. The economic suc...