BACKGROUND End-of-life decision making constitutes a major challenge for bioethical deliberation and political governance in modern democracies: On the one hand, it touches upon fundamental convictions about life, death, and the human condition. On the other, it is deeply rooted in religious traditions and historical experiences and thus shows great socio-cultural diversity. The bioethical disc...

Scripts are sites of religious, cultural and political power. Although scripts are often viewed solely as technical devices in the service of meaning, the particular histories of scripts’ coming into being, their uses and sometimes disappearance can tell us much about shifting religious agendas, memory and forgetting, and attachment to community and place. In my talk I explore the history of wr...

A first principle in ethics consultation is that reasoning is essential. A second principle is that the religious and cultural views of patients and their surrogates are usually respected. What can be done when these principles collide-when patients or surrogates have religious or cultural views and beliefs that clinicians find unreasonable or even offensive? Mediation may provide some approach...

BACKGROUND The relationship of cultural factors to the breastfeeding patterns has been documented. Given previous reports of the increased frequency and duration of breastfeeding in Orthodox Jewish women, an analysis of the religious and cultural basis of this phenomenon was performed. METHODOLOGY The published medical literature relating to the religious and sociodemographic variables in Jew...

We address the problem of cultural diversification by studying selection on cultural ideas that colonize human hosts and using diversification of religions as a conceptual example. In analogy to studying the evolution of pathogens or symbionts colonizing animal hosts, we use models for host-pathogen dynamics known from theoretical epidemiology. In these models, religious content colonizes indiv...

People often perceive important and improbable life outcomes as "meant to happen," that is, predetermined and inevitable. In 4 studies, we constructed diverse measures of such fate attributions and examined the cultural correlates of this attributional tendency, focusing on ethnic culture and religious affiliation differences. Independently of ethnic culture, Christians were found to endorse fa...

We propose a theoretical framework to study the determinants of ethnic and religious identity along two distinct motivational processes: cultural distinction and cultural conformity. Under cultural conformity, ethnic identity is reduced by neighborhood integration, which weakens group loyalties and prejudices. On the contrary, under cultural distinction, ethnic minorities are more motivated in ...

Religion can have an important influence in moral decision-making, and religious reminders may deter people from unethical behavior. Previous research indicated that religious contexts may increase prosocial behavior and reduce cheating. However, the perceptual-behavioral link between religious contexts and decision-making lacks thorough scientific understanding. This study adds to the current ...

According to the Religious Openness Hypothesis, the religious and psychological openness of American Christians is obscured by a defensive ghettoization of thought associated with a Religious Fundamentalist Ideological Surround and can be discovered instead within a Biblical Foundationalist Ideological Surround. A test of this claim examined Religious Fundamentalism, Biblical Foundationalism, Q...

Millions of girls are forcibly married during the transitional period between puberty and adulthood. At a stage of vulnerability cultural practices, religious rights and social standards place her in a position where she is catapult into womanhood. An advocate against forced child marriage could argue that child rights, cultural rights, religious rights, right to marry, right to life, right to ...