The subject of religious experience has been marginalised in the social sciences. Although authors such as James (1903) have suggested that religious experience is pre-cultural and pre-cognitive, this paper argues against the perennialist position, suggesting instead that religious experience and its narration are both socially constructed. The ideological role of religious experience is discus...

The dialogue highlighted some important aspects of how parents perceive immunisation, and what problems are involved in getting their children immunised in particular for a religious group, a rural community and aborigines. In order to achieve higher coverage and our objective of universal child immunisation at the local or district levels, we need to recognise the need for special immunisation...

The world will be harmonious one, the people with different religious beliefs in the world should strengthen close intercultural communication. And the intercultural communication will avoid any different wrong recognition about religious beliefs and respect different religious beliefs from different countries and cultures. Otherwise, it will cause unstable, inharmonious and terrible disaster o...

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...

In 2001 the first international conference on religion and the Internet was held at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Religious Encounters in Digital Networks brought together researchers from around the world to discuss their studies of religion online. In the concluding session the conference organisers made a call for “more serious research” and reflection into emerging expressions re...

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...

The decline in religious identification and corresponding increase in the unaffiliated has been one of the most important religious changes in the United Kingdom (UK). The emergence of the “religious nones” is the most obvious sign of continuing secularization and the declining social and cultural relevance of religion. Yet while the religiously-unaffiliated often form the plurality — if not so...

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...