Girard and the Millennials: New Perspectives on Evangelization Abstract René Girard in conversation with Charles Taylor can help us to analyze the connection between violence and religion. Girard’s lens of mimetic desire helps to clarify how Jesus was the anti-sacrifice who desired to end the scapegoat mechanism. Taylor provides a lens on the transcendent and its sometimes hidden presence in ou...

This article attempts to address the lack of terminology concerning the long-standing but often overlooked relationship between religion and entertainment in Japan, arguing that these two seemingly discrete and opposing fields are often conflated. Examining the underlying thought behind the animation films of director Miyazaki Hayao, and investigating audience responses to those works, the arti...

Review ofL. Philip Barnes, ed., Religion and Worldviews: The Triumph of the Secular in Religious Education (London: Routledge, 2023), pp. xi + 193, ISBN 978-1032206196. £22.99

How does religion shape the nature of insurgency? Do Islamist insurgents fight differently from those with secular aims, like national selfdetermination? Do they select different types of targets, use different military strategies, respond to different types of incentives? Scholarly attention to the role of religion in civil and interstate war has increased in recent years, but there remains li...

In a meta-analysis, the authors test the theoretical formulation that religiosity is a means for self-enhancement. The authors operationalized self-enhancement as socially desirable responding (SDR) and focused on three facets of religiosity: intrinsic, extrinsic, and religion-as-quest. Importantly, they assessed two moderators of the relation between SDR and religiosity. Macrolevel culture ref...

In two studies, 5- and 6-year-old children were questioned about the status of the protagonist embedded in three different types of stories. In realistic stories that only included ordinary events, all children, irrespective of family background and schooling, claimed that the protagonist was a real person. In religious stories that included ordinarily impossible events brought about by divine ...

Galen (2012), critically reviewing recent research on religion and prosociality, concludes that the religious prosociality hypothesis is a (congruence) fallacy. The observed effects are not real: They only reflect stereotypes and ingroup favoritism, are due to secular psychological effects, are inconsistent, and confound (e.g., by ignoring curvilinear relationships) those low in religiosity wit...

this study examines votes, ideologies and goals of iran’s cultural-intellectual currents after the islamic revolution in order to describe their scale and type impacts on women rights in iran. in the first section, a theoretical explanation of the relationship between social currents and legal demands based on social realism approach along with viewpoints of scholars who believe in the correlat...