This paper highlights unique aspects of social support in a religious context, with an emphasis on the practice of prayer. We first discus presuppositions that drive work in the area including (1) adoption of a ‘‘medical model’’ of evaluation and (2) the corollary influence of existential chauvinism. We next outline how religious groups differ from others with respect to the provision of meanin...

OBJECTIVE Many Americans use religious activity to cope with stressful life events. Our goal was to review systematically the recent medical literature to assess the role of religion in health outcomes. DATA SOURCES We conducted a comprehensive literature search using MEDLINE to identify studies published in the English language between January 1999 and June 2003 describing the effect of reli...

background and objectives: prayer is one of the most important religious ordinances and is one of the necessities of islam. in spite of the progression of medicine science, it is sometimes seen that the mundane subjects become hopeless in curing physical diseases and this time, the hopeless man appeals to the lord god. this review study was conducted to examine the positive and negative views r...

In this paper, we propose to analyze the phenomenon of Christian prayer by way of combining two different analytical frameworks. We start by applying Schutz's theories of "intersubjectivity," "inner time," "politheticality," and "multiple realities," and then proceed by drawing on the ideas and insights of linguistic philosophers, notably, Wittgenstein's "language-game," Austin's "speech act," ...

This study investigated the proposition of relaxation offered by performing the Muslim prayers by measuring the alpha brain activity in the frontal (F3-F4), central (C3-C4), parietal (P3-P4), and occipital (O1-O2) electrode placements using the International 10-20 System. Nine Muslim subjects were asked to perform the four required cycles of movements of Dhuha prayer, and the EEG were subsequen...

I am writing to express my concern over a statement made in your editorial in the October issue of the Journal. I disagree with the categorical statement that “hand wringing, prayer, and expressions of concern don’t work.” In my opinion, any statement that one’s personal efforts in advocacy are more effective that another’s prayers indicates either a considerable degree of arrogance or a disbel...