T heologian John Shea, STD, writing several years ago about CHA's Mission-Centered Leadership Competency Model, said that in health ministry the first step from faith to practicality—that is, concrete action on behalf of mission—is values. "Faith convictions and narratives are expressed in the full-blown religious language of the Catholic tradition, for example, God, Christ, sin, redemption, ch...

Brains are amazing organs in all creatures with central nervous systems and especially in human beings. But they are not perfect. Without forgetting the larger success story of cognitive evolution, I want to explore the way that cognitive biases sometimes produce errors in both religious and secular social settings and how such errors can be diagnosed and corrected when they occur. This will in...

Background Behaviour is guided by perceptions and traditions. As such, understanding culture and religion is important in order to understand healthcare behaviour. Religious perceptions shape a person's understanding of the world and are maintained through texts and tradition. One such important religious text in relation to sexual and reproductive health is the Nativity story. This account of ...

Is it possible to talk about God without either misrepresentation or failing to assert anything of significance? The article begins by reviewing how, in attempting to answer this question, traditional theories of religious language have failed to sidestep both potential pitfalls adequately. After arguing that recently developed theories of metaphor seem better able to shed light on the nature o...

Scholars of religion, including such luminaries as Durkheim, Rappaport, Turner, and Weber, have widely assumed that religion promotes intragroup trust among adherents. Recent applications of signaling theory to religious behavior among economists, cognitive scientists, and evolutionary anthropologists further endorse this assumption. However, trust has not been rigorously or consistently define...

Achieving goals often requires the completion of sequential actions, such as finishing a series of assignments to pass a class. In the course of pursuing such goals, people can decide how closely to follow their personal standards for each action. We propose that actions at the beginning and end of a sequence appear more diagnostic of the pursuer's personal standards than do actions in the midd...

The Aymara Pentecostalism is one of the most important religious movements in Chile. In the last decades it has been produced a considerable amount of sociological and anthropological research about this movement and this has resulted in the emergency of a particular field. However, these studies have not the thematized the relevance of the theoretical assumptions that underlie in their analysi...

This article lays out some of the major features of the proposed research on Catholic governance practices in a context of Polish post-communist social change. Firstly, it proposes to examine how market action in Poland was embedded in socio-normative structures infl uenced by Catholic social agency. In such a perspective, it is suggested that the attention should be paid to the role of Catholi...