Major World Religions Research Articles

Conservation implications of the diffusion of Christian religious ideals in rural Africa

Throughout developing countries, major world religions are spreading into areas important for biodiversity conservation, and little is know about the potential effects of this expansion. This paper examines the effect of religious ideals on mechanisms that underlie changes in population growth, economic development, and land conversion within a polygamous, agro-pastoral society near Tarangire National Park in northern Tanzania where Christianity is spreading rapidly. Mixed qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis are used to (1) identify primary Christian ideals and church messages within local communities regarding family planning, development, and land use; and (2) estimate the association between church membership and household measures of family size, school enrollment, and land use controlling for other factors. Findings indicate that the effects of church messages and membership may be consistent with conversation goals to limit population growth, promote local development, and encourage certain land uses over others.

Межкультурный диалог в процессе становления и формирования поликультурных компетентностей личности педагога

This country is one of the world’s most multinational states; among the peoples inhabiting this country up to 180 ethnoses and ethnic groups
 and followers of all major world religions are represented, as well as groups, belonging to various ethnoconfessional communities, several civilization
 and cultural as well as historic and cultural communities.

Human rights and the world's major religions

Human rights and the world's major religions

What’s So Funny About Arguing with God? A Case for Playful Argumentation from Jewish Literature

In this paper, we show that God is portrayed in the Hebrew Bible and in the Rabbinic literature—some of the very Hebrew texts that have influenced the three major world religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—as One who can be argued with and even changes his mind. Contrary to fundamentalist positions, in the Hebrew Bible and other Jewish texts God is omniscient but enjoys good, playful argumentation, broadening the possibilities for reasoning and reasonability. Arguing with God has also had a profound influence upon Jewish humor, demonstrating that humans can joke with God. More specifically, we find in Jewish literature that humor’s capacity to bisociate between different domains of human experience can share a symbiotic relationship with argumentation’s emphasis on producing multiple, contested perspectives. Overall, once mortals realize that figures such as God can accept many perspectives through humor, teasing, arguing, criticism, and in at least one case, even lawsuits, a critical point emerges: citizens should learn to live, laugh, and reason with others with whom they disagree.

Becoming Refugias: Climate Change and a Change of Heart

Climate change is the most significant moral, ethical and spiritual issue of our time. All other social and justice issues are increasingly linked back to climate change. Leaders of the major world religions have written documents and called for people of faith to become engaged. Yet, faith communities do not become engaged in this social and spiritual concern. Secular society is looking for moral guidance and faith communities have significant wisdom and practices to offer. Linking science with theological reflections, justice imperatives and praxis may assist ministers in grappling with the critical concern of climate change that looms ever larger as we move deeper into the twenty-first century. The shift in worldview and theology that is required could not only renew the earth and care for brothers and sisters but could be an opportunity for renewing religious traditions and deepening a sense of identity, collaboration and community worldwide.

Portrayal of Women in Major World Religions

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/bodhi.v6i0.9245 Bodhi Vol.6 2013: 50-64

Religious Perspectives on the Use of Psychopharmaceuticals as an Enhancement Technology

The use of psychopharmaceuticals as an enhancement technology has been the focus of attention in the bioethics literature. However, there has been little examination of the challenges that this practice creates for religious traditions that place importance on questions of being, authenticity, and identity. We asked expert commentators from six major world religions to consider the issues raised by psychopharmaceuticals as an enhancement technology. These commentaries reveal that in assessing the appropriate place of medical therapies, religious traditions, like secular perspectives, rely upon ideas about health and disease and about normal human behavior. But unlike secular perspectives, faith traditions explicitly concern themselves with ways in which medicine should or should not be used to live a "good life".

The World Religion Dataset, 1945–2010: Logic, Estimates, and Trends

This study introduces a new dataset on world religions. The World Religion Project consists of (a) a systematically developed classification of major world religions and religious families within major world religions, which enabled (b) the collection of data on the distribution of the population of all states in the international system across these religious categories, over the period of 1945–2010, and (c) a set of methods to reconcile among conflicting data from multiple sources, to deal with missing data, and to integrate multiple figures for a given observation. In the present study we discuss the significance of the World Religion Project, its internal logic and the development of the religion tree system of classification, and the data collection and data management process. We then provide a number of descriptive statistics about national, dyadic, regional, and global distributions of world religions, as well as some preliminary relationships between the religious similarity of states and their regime type, alliance patterns, and propensity to conflict. We discuss the potential contribution of this dataset to the study of the relationship between religion and international conflict and cooperation.

Religion and religiosity: protective or harmful factors for sexual minority youth?

Sexual minority youth are disproportionately impacted by a number of psychosocial risks including a greater likelihood of non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) when compared to heterosexual counterparts. Emerging research seeks to identify the risk and resilience factors that contribute to the mental health of this stigmatised population. Considering that most Americans grow up with at least some religious teachings and that most major world religions have historically condemned same sex sexuality, the current study examines the association between religious tradition, religiosity, and NSSI behaviour. Results indicate that religion plays both a protective and harmful role for sexual minority youth. Those identifying as Christians with high religious guidance had the greatest risk, seculars had a comparatively moderate risk, and Christians with low religious guidance had the least risk. Implications for clinical practice and future areas of research are discussed.

Sufism and mental health

Human experience in, health and disease, always has a spiritual dimension. pirituality is accepted as one of the defining determinants of health and it no more remains a sole preserve of religion and mysticism. In recent years, pirituality has been an area of research in neurosciences and both in the nderstanding of psychiatric morbidity and extending therapeutic interventions it seems to be full of promises. Sufism has been a prominent spiritual tradition in Islam deriving influences from major world religions, such as, Christianity and Hinduism and contributing substantially toward spiritual well-being of a large number of people within and outside Muslim world. Though Sufism started in early days of Islam and had many prominent Sufis, it is in the medieval period it achieved great height culminating in many Sufi orders and their major proponents. The Sufism aims communion with God through spiritual realization; soul being the agency of this communion, and propounding the God to be not only the cause of all existence but the only real existence. It may provide a vital link to understand the source of religious experience and its impact on mental health.

Islamic Educational Goals, Methods, and Content, with Emphasis on Shia' Faith

As a major world religion representing approximately 20% of the human family, Islam holds particular and significant educational perspectives. The purpose of this article is to identify and interpret the viewpoints of Islam on education (with emphasis on Shia' faith). To accomplish this aim, “educational goals” from the viewpoint of Islam have been represented and the educational methods (teaching methods) and content have been described. The Qur'an, Islamic traditions, and Muslim scholars' views have been referenced for the purpose of defining these educational views. The results of the research show that many important educational implications can be understood from these sources, and applied in contemporary Muslim education.

OLD SAGE FOR NEW AGE? THE REVIVAL OF RELIGIOUS CONFUCIANISM IN CHINA

In recent years, Confucianism has been once again identified as the essence of Chinese civilization and a religion that was central to the Chinese people throughout China’s long history. Scholars are appealing to the Communist Party to make Confucianism the State religion (guojiao). What are the political implications of the phenomena? Can these claims stand to intellectual scrutiny? Conducting a brief historical survey of religious Confucianism in Chinese politics, in addition to an analysis of shared principles essential to various Confucianist positions today, this paper argues that religious Confucianism presented by its contemporary promoters is a constructed myth originated mainly from the Qing times (1644- 1911). The supposed Confucian teaching does not carry religious meaningfulness associated to either individual existence or social life in contemporary China. It remains powerful primarily in connection to the State, or a collective nation (Zhonghua), vis-à-vis the world outside ethnic Han communities. Despite this - or precisely because of this - a revived religious Confucianism may have the greatest potential to become a political force in China in our globalizing age, more so than any other major world religions, even if others may have larger Chinese following than Confucianism.

Sacred Books in English Translation

Sacred texts convey the tenets of religious faith and are central to the world's believers. These texts were originally written in a variety of non-English languages, making them inaccessible to many readers. Wayne Bivens-Tatum offers a carefully selected collection of English translations of the sacred texts fundamental to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judiasm--together comprising approximately 77 percent of the world's practicing believers. Bivens-Tatum is the Philosophy and Religion Librarian at the Princeton University Library, where he provides general and specialized reference and instruction, develops and manages the philosophy and religion collections, and acts as liaison to the departments of Philosophy and Religion. He has graduate degrees in English and Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois. He writes frequently about issues in reference, instruction, collection development, technology, and higher education on his blog, AcademicLibrarian.net. His new book Libraries and the Enlightenment is available from the Library Juice Press. This is his second contribution to the Alert Collector.--Editor The following survey is intended to provide a brief guide to building a representative collection of English translations of books sacred to Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Considering the overwhelming number of sacred books of some religions and the large number of world religions, I have deliberately considered a small number of major world religions and tried to focus on the most significant books within those. For some religions, the choices were easy and for others much more difficult. I have focused on contemporary translations in print, preferably in relatively inexpensive editions easily available from Amazon.com or other booksellers. Most of these books are available in older translations, many of which have been digitized and are available for free through the Internet. However, older translations are often less reliable and less readable than more current translations, and usually do not have notes, commentaries, introductions, and other scholarly additions that are helpful for readers. I assume readers approaching these texts are studying the religions casually and as non-practitioners. Serious students of any of the religions would need to be familiar with the texts in their original languages. Practitioners might need such familiarity with the original languages depending on the religion. Christians rarely have any familiarity with New Testament Greek, for example, while for Muslims the Arabic Qur'an is the only authoritative version. In this article, I do not discuss primary language editions at all. Also, any study of the books in question is best done along with secondary sources such as encyclopedias, commentaries, and histories--none of which I address. Instead, I have gathered information about the texts that is now scattered throughout numerous sources to provide a short guide for librarians selecting books. This is an organized bibliography of (mostly) primary sources in translation for the religions in question with very brief introductions explaining their significance. Below is a recommended list of books by religion, followed by a very short list of the most representative titles and a brief bibliography of works used in compiling this bibliography and which can also serve as further reading about the books listed below. No selection could be perfect, but the collection below should provide a respectable sampling of the sacred books of the selected religions. HINDUISM Hinduism contains a very large number of sacred books spanning centuries. For our purposes, I shall focus on the books most commonly studied in English. The original language of early Hindu sacred books is Sanskrit and the way they should be appreciated is through speech rather than the written word. By talking about English translations of Sanskrit works best appreciated through oral recitation, we are obviously far removed from the appreciation of Hinduism from the inside. …

Religion and Sexual Behaviors

Social scientists have long been interested in how cultural and structural characteristics shape individuals’ actions. We investigate this relationship by examining how macro- and micro-level religious effects shape individuals’ reports of premarital and extramarital sex. We look at how identifying with one of the major world religions—Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, or Judaism—and living in a nation with a Muslim culture shape the likelihood of sex outside of marriage. Using hierarchical modeling techniques and cross-national data from the Demographic and Health Surveys, we find that ever married Hindus and Muslims are less likely to report having had premarital sex than are ever married Jews and Christians, and an earlier age at marriage does not appear to explain the relationship. Married Muslims are also less likely than affiliates of all other religions, except Buddhists, to report extramarital sex. The percentage Muslim within a nation decreases the odds of reports of premarital sex and this relationship is not explained by restrictions on women’s mobility. These findings contribute to research on religion, culture, policy, and health, as well as our understanding of the macro-micro relationship.

Religion, religious ethics, and nursing

The past 25 years have witnessed an escalating discussion on the role of spirituality within health care. This scholarly volume is rooted in the belief that not only is religion integral to nursing care, but the religious beliefs of both nurse and patient can significantly influence care and its outcome. It offers an in-depth analysis of the ways in which religion influences the discipline of nursing, its practitioners, and treatment outcomes. Through the contributions of an international cadre of nurse scholars representing the world's major religious traditions, the book explores how theories, history and theologies shape the discipline, bioethical decision making, and the perspective of the nurse or patient who embraces a particular religion. It examines the commonalities between the values and thinking of nursing and religion and identifies basic domains in which additional research is necessary. The authors believe that ultimately, scholarly dialogue on the relationship between religion and nursing will foster and enhance nursing practice that is ethical and respectful of personal values. Key Features: Offers in-depth analysis of how religion influences the discipline of nursing, its practitioners, and treatment outcomes Uses critical theories to explore the intersections of religion, ethics, culture, health, gender, power, and health policy Includes an overview of all major world religions Focuses on the implications of religion for nursing practice rather than nursing interventions Designed for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students, nurse academicians and clinicians

Fundamentalism and Fanaticism

Despite the fact that fanaticism exists in world religions, there has been a strong tendency to associate Islam with fundamentalism and fanaticism. Consequently, many scholars view the terms as almost synonymous. What exactly is fanaticism and what are some of the reasons for its occurrence? If all the world’s great religions preach peace and the preservation of life, why do fanatics kill and maim in the name of their religion? How did this term come to be closely associated with Islam rather than other major world religions, and most particularly in the last three decades? Is this connection justified academically or otherwise? What have contemporary and classical Muslim scholars written about the above terms? This paper will address the above questions, including the concept of “fanaticism” and “fundamentalism,” the relationship between fanaticism and Islamic revivalism, and whether fanaticism can be “cured.”

Self-interest and moral motivations of believers

In this paper, I consider an important objection to moral motivation of believers. It is the objection that their acts are motivated by self-interest, i.e. their personal salvation. Such motivation is sometimes identified as selfish. Therefore, I demonstrate the distinction between self-interest and selfishness. I would like to remind the reader that the critique of self-interest as moral motivation of believers appears within the very traditions of the major world religions. Then, I argue that some contemporary forms of secular ethics, even at the highest levels, still refer to a certain form of self-interest.

Public Faith and the Politics of Faith: A Review Essay

A symposium entitled In the Presence of Faith: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Southern African Studies of Religion was held in Johannesburg from 24 to 26 February 2010.1 This review essay outlines our rationale for the symposium, highlights its most pressing debates, and introduces the papers included in this special edition of the journal for the Study of Religion, an edition entitled Public and the Politics of Faith.The SymposiumThere were a number of reasons to call together a symposium of this nature. As organisers and in our own work we have been struck by the very limited extent of inter-disciplinary reading, discussion or collaboration about Our first wish was to create a place where scholars from different disciplines who have an interest in religion could converse together and be exposed to a diversity of questions, methods and literatures. In doing this, we hoped to open a debate about how religion has been studied in Southern Africa, what is missing and where the field should be moving. Drawing on the experience of Wiser' s 2007 Reasons of event, the organisers made efforts to invite the participation of historians, sociologists and anthropologists as well as those working from religious studies departments.Our second wish was to invite and stimulate more empirical attention to religion, particularly by social science and humanities scholars. We also hoped to raise a discussion on topics not normally encountered under the purview of religion in the social sciences. We were interested in the relationship between religion and the state, both in how religious communities attempt to influence the state, but also how the state structures its relationship with religious communities. The relationship of African nationalism to religion, both Christianity (independent and mainstream) as well as traditional, was also something we felt would lead to productive discussion. We were also interested in topics we felt had been neglected in the regional scholarship, such as personal conceptions and appreciations of faith; the public role of Christians who attend mainstream churches in Southern Africa; and the need to engage between traditional, independent and mainstream forms of religion in our theory and research. And we sought to pay attention to some of the growing religious phenomena of the last two decades, not least of which is the increasing Pentecostal involvement in public life. There is a great deal of work yet to be done on this.As part of our planning we carefully weighed up the use of our words. In choosing our symposium title, we opted for the more polysemie word faith, instead of the more normative religion. The former, we felt, offered a point of ingress into the symposium of a wider set of views on spiritual practice; it also offered a way to move beyond more dogmatic understandings of Faith also seemed to offer a way for comparative discussions between some of the major world religions practised in the region, allowing for a symposium in which scholars of Islam, Judaism, African spirituality and Christianity could speak alongside one another.A third rationale for the symposium lay in the great need for scholars working in South Africa and other Southern African countries to engage in dialogue on One reason is that there is an increasingly dense network of religious and labour migration across our respective borders. A regional perspective on such migration and the study of transnational religious communities is increasingly imperative.The call for papers elicited an enthusiastic response. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the majority of abstracts were theological in orientation. The planning group decided to exclude them. Many reflected a narrow focus on Biblical scholarship, or were poorly-researched from a social scientific perspective. As such, they did not meet the requirements of our call for papers. The high volume of scholarly theological and Biblical publishing in South Africa does not evidence much attention to most of the issues referred to above. …

The law of the leading digits and the world religions

Benford’s law states that the occurrence of significant digits in many data sets is not uniform but tends to follow a logarithmic distribution such that the smaller digits appear as first significant digits more frequently than the larger ones. We investigate here numerical data on the country-wise adherent distribution of seven major world religions i.e. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism and Baha’ism to see if the proportion of the leading digits occurring in the distribution conforms to Benford’s law. We find that the adherent data of all the religions, except Christianity, excellently does conform to Benford’s law. Furthermore, unlike the adherent data on Christianity, the significant digit distribution of the three major Christian denominations i.e. Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy obeys the law. Thus in spite of their complexity general laws can be established for the evolution of religious groups.

The Man Who Was Thursday : Chesterton's Duel with the Fin de Siècle

In former days heretic was proud of not being a heretic. It was kingdoms of world and police and judges who were heretics. He was orthodox. He had no pride in having rebelled against them; they had rebelled against him. armies with their cruel security, kings with their cold faces, decorous processes of State, reasonable processes of law--all these like sheep had gone astray. man was proud of being orthodox, was proud of being right. If he stood alone in a howling wilderness he was more than a man; he was a church. He was centre of universe; it was round him that stars swung. All tortures torn out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical. But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. He says, with a conscious laugh, suppose I am very heretical, and looks round for applause. word heresy not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. word orthodoxy not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. Bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his orthodoxy. dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox. G.K. CHESTERTON, HERETICS History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. JAMES JOYCE, ULYSSES CHAPTER X OF Man Who Was Thursday: Nightmare (1907) is titled The Duel. It features hero, Gabriel Syme, in exhausting swordplay with impossibly unharmed Marquis de Saint Eustache--a literal duel that reflects many figurative ones that occur throughout novel. Chesterton had many quarrels with his time (only such a man could title one of his books What's Wrong with World) and enjoyed dueling over any issue that came to light in pages of Daily News or from pens of friendly adversaries such as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. And while issues that Chesterton debated were numerous and filled pages of Illustrated London News for thirty years, of his work can be read as an argument for importance of what C.S. Lewis would, almost forty years after publication of Thursday, call the Tao: the sole source of all value judgments (1) that informs all major world religions--the doctrine of objective value, belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others are really false. (2) Chesterton, with uncharacteristic brevity, used label (3) for this same idea, resisting, quite consciously, splitting apart of reason and emotion, mind and body, spirit and matter, which had occurred unconsciously in so many of his contemporaries. (4) To Chesterton, what proved truth of general theories was their very generality, a shared belief that what are commonly called Judeo-Christian ethics are the best root of energy and ethics, (5) and belief that not all questions of value are relative or solely functions of time and space. In Orthodoxy, published a year after Thursday, Chesterton characterizes his era--which he feared was moving toward increasingly relativistic values--with remark, A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about truth; this has been exactly reversed. (6) Chesterton's great and extended duel against what he viewed as (at best) a wooden-headed and (at worst) a pernicious moral entropy was fought in pages of his novels, short stories, verse, essays, and apologia; his greatest foes were not figures such as Shaw and Wells, whose values ran counter to Chesterton's own, but those who denied importance of such intellectual contests in first place. Chesterton spent much of his life reacting against certainties, and uncertainties, of his age. …