I began my study of religion as a hobby years before I formally entered the academic world. During my informal studies I never gave much thought to just what religion is. I gleaned the bookstore shelves in sections marked " Religion, " never considering why some books appeared on these shelves and others appeared on the " New Age and Occult " section. My study of religion was simple — my concep...

Using data from the National Survey of Adolescents (2004), we examine the community-level factors associated with early age at first sex among adolescents 14-19 years old in four African countries. Regression models are fitted separately by sex for each country for an outcome measuring early age at first sex, with a focus on community-level factors as potential influences of age on sexual debut...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship among spiritual and religious beliefs and practices, social support, and diabetes self-care activities in African Americans with type 2 diabetes, hypothesizing that there would be a positive association. METHOD This cohort study used a cross-sectional design that focused on baseline data from a larger randomized control tria...

A sample of 34 poor Black women who exchanged sex for crack was screened to discover if sex-for-crack exchanges resulted in pregnancies. Ethnographic interviews were conducted with women who became pregnant this way. Out of the 34 women, 18 reported sex-for-crack pregnancies, and more than half of that number became pregnant this way more than once. Twenty-nine pregnancies were reported. Only 2...

The propensity for religious belief and behavior is a universal feature of human societies, but religious practice often imposes substantial costs upon its practitioners. This suggests that during human cultural evolution, the costs associated with religiosity might have been traded off for psychological or social benefits that redounded to fitness on average. One possible benefit of religious ...

BACKGROUND Consideration and better understanding of patients' needs on the part of the healthcare system might help increase the number of people seeking necessary medical care. Many studies have been conducted on patients' preferences in choosing their health care provider, but the majority of them were conducted in modern western societies, establishing a need to explore other populations. T...

Background & aim: One of the most important events in human life is marriage. Sexual satisfaction is one of the effective factors in a successful marriage. Accordingly, sexual health education is necessary. Sex education should be in line with the cultural, religious, and social infrastructures of the society. The aim of this study was to compare the effect of sex education with and without rel...

Introduction: Although the psychological aspects of rhinoplasty have been fully investigated in the medical literature, the religiosity of rhinoplasty candidates has not been taken into consideration. Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study, the religious attitudes of 157 rhinoplasty candidates were compared with those of 74 subjects who had not requested rhinoplasty. A domestic v...

What role, authors Paul Abramson and Steven Pinkerton ask, does sexual pleasure play in our lives? Is the pursuit of sexual enjoyment in our blood? Our brains? Our very nature? Regardless of the source, it can be agreed that the joys of sex are widely appreciated. Why, then, is pleasure so often overlooked in discussions of sexual behavior, and why do cultural, historical, and religious treatis...

Sex selection for non-medical reasons is a major controversy in around the world. Here in this paper, we presented the ethical arguments about sex selection for non-medical reasons and discuss about them in Islamic context. Significant arguments about sex selection relate to sexism and sex discrimination, sex disproportion, human dignity, playing God, psychological pressure on unselected childr...