In this article, we consider the intersection of religious coping and the experience of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in a lifespan sample of adults living in South Louisiana during the 2005 storms. Participants were young, middle-age, older, and oldest-old adults who were interviewed during the post-disaster recovery period. Qualitative analyses confirmed that three dimensions of religion were r...

My concern in this paper is the relationship between faith and practical rationality. I seek to develop a unified account of statements of faith concerning mundane matters and those concerning religious faith. To do so, I consider the sense in which faith requires going beyond the evidence, and argue that faith requires terminating the search for further evidence. Having established this, I tur...

While citizens can know scientific facts, they also have faith in science - with faith defined as a firm belief for which there is no proof. Using national public opinion surveys from twelve nations from 1993 to 2010, I examine three different types of faith in science that citizens could hold. I examine temporal changes in levels of faith in science as well as the social determinants of each t...

Both parents and peers have been validated by previous research as being important contributors to the development of religious faith. The purpose of this study was to elucidate the contributions of the transmission (e.g., parent church attendance) and transactional (e.g., discussions about faith) models of socialization, as well as explore the possibility that a third model, the transformation...

This paper argues that there is value in a systematic philosophical approach to relations and surveys some of the major issues in the philosophy of relations. Rather than siding with relational ontology over substantivist ontology, however, the paper argues that the best philosophical approaches are causal theories of relation in which both relations and entities take their rise from an ontolog...

The debate about the moral status of corporations has been wide-ranging and complex. In this paper a way of structuring the debate is proposed. At the same time, arguments within the “corporate moral agency” debate are considered in relation to the notion of Artificial Moral Agency. The entire exercise points to the importance of philosophical pragmatism and the prospect of ‘artificial ethics’.

Sarkar and Seshadri have presented an interesting paper in this issue on the ethical approach that a physician should take when faced with requests for faith healing (1). The paper describes four approaches that the physician can take. These are rejecting the request, keeping oneself detached from the issue, endorsing the request and trying to understand the practices concerned so as to make a ...