Executive Summary: Amidst the intensified global focus on the ongoing conflict between the Israeli and Palestinian people, internal issues exist within each group. Cleavages exist within Israeli society both on a religious, socioeconomic, and even an ethnic level. These internal rifts play a role in preventing a peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. A case study evaluation of the Israeli...

In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter argues against the special legal status of religion, claiming that religion should not be the only ground for exemptions to the law and that this form of protection should be, in principle, available for the claims of secular conscience as well. However, in the last chapter of his book, he objects to a universal regime of exemptions for both religious and...

Economic growth has not led to a decline in religion despite past predictions that it would. Using a formal model of religious competition, I show how economic growth produces counteracting effects on religious activity in an open religious market, and that it has little effect in a religious market that is already secularized due to regulations that prohibit religious competition or in a highl...

Does religion shape political competition in Thailand? Despite the prominence of religiously inflected rhetoric good and evil contemporary contestation, existing research suggests that it does not. This article challenges this conventional wisdom. Survey data collected connection with Thailand’s 2019 general election, which marked a transition from direct military rule to hybrid regime, allow u...

Drawing on surveys of religion and values in Great Britain, this paper suggests that Peter Berger's paradigm of two pluralisms can be usefully supplemented by taking account of a third kind of intensified pluralism. This involves the breakdown of the boundaries between religions, and between the religious and the secular, and is therefore a pluralism of de-differentiation. It helps explain many...

This research paper addresses secularization from both political and religious perspectives. One of its manifestations in the political sphere is that of globalization that can lead to alienation within society; and in the United Kingdom this is exemplified by Brexit. Within the religious sphere secularization is usually couched in oppositional terms. This paper reclaims the original use ...

The idea of a market in human organs has traditionally met with widespread and emphatic rejection from both secular and religious fronts alike. However, as numerous human beings continue to suffer an uncertain fate on transplant waiting lists, voices are beginning to emerge that are willing at least to explore the option of human organ sales. Anyone who argues for such a option must contend, ho...

The 2011–2014 controversies between the Ethiopian Government and Muslim communities on the role of Islam in Ethiopia have highlighted the precarious nature of religious relations in Ethiopia. Statements by public figures and religious leaders recently have drawn attention to the nature and scope of the Ethiopian secular state order. This paper describes the recent Muslim protest movement and th...

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...