Previous theoretical and empirical studies of the effects of religion on adherents' prosociality have focused, almost entirely on the intragroup and intergroup aspects of religion, as facilitators of prosocial attitudes and behaviors. The moral values preached by various religions were treated inseparably, as part of a whole of religious practices, which contribute to the evolution of cohesive,...

After reviewing various forms of multiple religious belonging, the author argues for the necessity of preliminary first principles, primarily coming from a considered form of a theology of religions. While an exclusivist theology would not allow multiple belongings, forms of inclusivism, pluralism, and postmodern mutualism provide possibilities. Since Roman Catholicism takes the most typical in...

The role of religion in American politics and civil society has drawn significant scholarly focus, but most of the recent attention has fallen on the religious right’s political influence and, more recently, on new initiatives to broaden the channeling of social service funding through faithbased organizations. These are important issues, but they exclude another historically important face of ...

It is now recognised that people often collaborate when completing information seeking tasks, and a number of specialised tools and systems have been developed to support such behaviour. Such systems often allow for distribution of search results among collaborators. The goal of this division of labour is to enable concurrent work while also preventing redundancy in results distribution. This p...

Introduction This chapter considers social patterns that contribute to shaping the position of women in Arab societies today. It focuses on the impact of two central sources of influence: cultural and especially religious heritage and Arab intellectual production. Culture plays a pervasive role in composing the social context of women's position in the Arab world, and religious interpretations ...

This study examines the moral and ethical aspects of creating savior siblings using Kant’s moral-philosophical theory and Beauchamp and Childress’s (B&C) principles of medical ethics. In this study, the researchers argue that three of the four clusters of the principles of B&C framework are derived from common morality and Kant’s ethics. Besides, the second part of this article is designed as a...

The article provides a critical assessment of the more recent literature that relies on theoretical frameworks such as post modernism and globalization to deal with national identity, ethnicity and cultural mobility. Explaining sensitive and complicated issues such as identity requires the extensive use of the native historical, cultural and sociological sources related to the Iranian experienc...

This special panel session provides an opportunity to discuss how entertainment computing designers create interactive media/ contents on Buddhism and also other religious practices. In this year, we have launched an exciting project designing interactive contents to be used in Todaiji temple, one of the world heritages located in Nara, Japan. In this project, we are actually collaborating with...

Cognitive theory and research have traditionally highlighted the relevance of the core beliefs about oneself, the world, and the future to human emotions. For some individuals, however, core beliefs may also explicitly involve spiritual themes. In this article, we propose a cognitive model of worry, in which positive/negative beliefs about the Divine affect symptoms through the mechanism of int...

A growing number of scholars argues that we are witnessing a resurgenceof religion in world politics, accompanied by an increasein religiously inspired conflict. Empirical studies demonstrate thatreligious conflicts more violent, intense, durable, andmore difficult to resolve through negotiated settlements than theirsecular counterparts. In this paper, argue these conclusionsare unreliable, bec...