theoretical expectations. The assumption is that along with modernization and economic development, adherence to religious world views (seen to be a relic of the past) gradually dissipate, as they have in other advanced societies. But they haven’t in the United States. In fact, the importance of religious commitments and religious organizations to American society increased over the last severa...

The problem of minimum-fuel, time-fixed, low-thrust rendezvous is addressed with the particular aim of developing a solver to determine optimal low-thrust Peer-to-Peer (P2P) maneuvers, which will be an integral part of distributed lowthrust servicing missions for multiple satellites. We develop the solver based on an indirect optimization technique and utilize the well-known shooting method to ...

A national random sample of hospital directors was asked to rate the importance of seven categories of chaplain roles and functions: 246 nursing directors, 267 social services directors, 307 medical directors, and 611 pastoral care directors. All four groups rated end-of-life care, prayer, and emotional support as being between very important and extremely important. Other roles, including cons...

The neuropsychology of religious activity in normal and selected clinical populations is reviewed. Religious activity includes beliefs, experiences, and practice. Neuropsychological and functional imaging findings, many of which have derived from studies of experienced meditators, point to a ventral cortical axis for religious behavior, involving primarily the ventromedial temporal and frontal ...

Patrick McNamara has made a thoughtful and nuanced contribution to a growing field centered on questions concerning brain activity required for, and involved in, religious life. In a field spanning the disciplines of neuroscience and religious studies it is often hard to find a perspective that has been thoroughly developed on both frontiers for the obvious reason that both are so expansive. Bu...

Abstract This essay examines qur’anic “exhortation” and “legal paraenesis” in light of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry late antique biblical traditions. It analyzes the verb waʿaẓa related forms narrative legal/legislative sections suras that can be assigned to different chronological stages Qur’an’s textual genesis. Qur’anic exhortations initially occur narratives about messengers sent unbelieving p...

This paper explores neurotic and religious components of conversion and psychophysiological sequelae of Holocaust trauma in a child of concentration camp inmates. The patient is a 26-year-old married woman of orthodox Jewish faith, whose presenting symptom was noncyclic uterine bleeding. The uniqueness of the symptom is emphasized within the defensive use it represents of the ritual menstrual c...

BACKGROUND The experience of 'sensed presence'-a feeling or sense that another entity, individual or being is present despite no clear sensory or perceptual evidence-is known to occur in the general population, appears more frequently in religious or spiritual contexts, and seems to be prominent in certain psychiatric or neurological conditions and may reflect specific functions of social cogni...