Any student of comparative religion will notice - and seek to identify as well - the points of similarity and difference between various religions. One might even claim that the discipline of “influence studies” has its roots in these discussions of comparison and contrast. However, these discussions persistently fail to address the nuances of particular faiths. Here, I intend to shed some ligh...

Contemporaries of Charles Darwin were divided on reconciling his theory of natural selection with religion and morality. Although Alfred Russel Wallace stands out as a spiritualist advocate of natural selection who rejected a natural origin of morality, the science popularizer and spiritualist Arabella Buckley (1840–1929) offers a more representative example of how theists, whether spiritualist...

Ethnicity has long been a major subject in the realm of social research in the UK. It describes an umbrella of characteristics that are based on the premise that groups of people who have their roots in common ancestry, religion, nationality, language and territory share similar traits and culture (Bulmer, 1996). The definition, measurement and classification of ethnicity has attracted on-going...

Religion is a collection of behavior that is only unified in our Western conception of it. It need not have a natural unity. There is no reason to assume, and good reason not to assume, that all religious behavior evolved together at the same time in response to a single shift in the environment. This article does not look at the religion as a unified entity and seek a definition of its essence...

any student of comparative religion will notice - and seek to identify as well - the points of similarity and difference between various religions. one might even claim that the discipline of “influence studies” has its roots in these discussions of comparison and contrast. however, these discussions persistently fail to address the nuances of particular faiths. here, i intend to shed some ligh...

People often behave as if category members share an essence, and essentialising a category in this way promotes inductive inference. Although natural kind categories have been predominantly studied, some social categories are essentialised and here we consider the inductive potential of religion categories for children in Northern Ireland. We asked seven-, nineand eleven-year olds in Catholic-m...