Religious Choice Research Articles

Predicting age of atheism: credibility enhancing displays and religious importance, choice, and conflict in family of upbringing

ABSTRACTThe cultural learning concept of Credibility Enhancing Displays (CREDs) concerns the extent to which behavioral models consistently live out their professed ideals. While researchers have suggested that past CRED exposure is an important variable for predicting who does and does not become a religious believer, it is unclear how CREDs relate to when a person rejects the religious beliefs modeled to them during their upbringing. Using a large sample of formerly believing atheists, two analyses assessed the ability of CREDs to predict the age at which an individual became an atheist. In the first analysis (n = 5,153), CREDs were positively associated with a delay in Age of Atheism, with family-level religious variables (Religious Importance, Religious Choice, and Religious Conflict) moderating this relationship. In the second analysis (n = 3,210), CREDs remained a stable predictor of Age of Atheism while controlling for demographics, parental quality, religious variables, relational variables, and institutional variables. Overall, while findings support a robust relation of CREDs to atheistic outcomes even when controlling for many other variables that influence religious transmission processes, they also highlight the importance of considering how such other variables modify the impact of CREDs on (non)religious outcomes.

Rohingya’s Genocide: Human Rights and Politics

The Rohingya’s most persecuted ethnic minority, practicing Sunni Islam, traces their origin from Arakan kingdom. The present democratic government of Myanmar and previous military junta have practiced ethnic cleansing and denies to grant citizenship to Rohingya’s making them stateless. There has been great violation against this ethnic group by the Myanmar government in one or the other way like restriction on freedom of movement religious choice, unemployment, education, marriage and family planning. On the contrary the present de facto leader of Myanmar has totally denied such ethnic cleansing and brushed away the criticism of her not handling the crisis. This paper tries to understand the dynamics and severity involved, the origin of the ethnic tension, the exclusionary policies of the government and also examines the abuse, discrimination and gross human rights violation of Rohingya Muslims which leads to the politicization of the issue and vice-versa i.e. how politicization of the issue leads to gross human rights violation. This paper further analyzes the pattern of violation, international politics and the political and economic interest vested which contributed to forced displacement in Myanmar not only of the Rohingya’s but other minorities like the Shan, the Kachin, the Karen and how this crisis has fi red up the political debate in the neighboring countries and has become a political contention and concludes with recommendation to be taken by the government and international organization to improve the situation of the minorities in Myanmar.

Nutritional Considerations for Dialysis Vegetarian Patients, Part Two

Nutritional Considerations for Dialysis Vegetarian Patients, Part Two

The relationships between religiosity and youth internalizing symptoms in African American parent-adolescent dyads.

African American (AA) adolescents face a greater risk of internalizing symptoms, including symptoms of both depression and anxiety, compared with other racial groups; yet, relatively less is known about the variables that contribute to internalizing symptoms. With the aim of advancing this work, this study examined factors that may buffer against such symptoms (maternal warmth, religiosity), as well as those that may confer additional risk (maternal psychopathology). One hundred ninety-three AA single mothers and their adolescent youth reported on religiosity, maternal warmth and depressive symptoms, and youth internalizing symptoms. Dyadic structural equation modeling was used to examine the effects of mother and adolescent religiosity, maternal warmth, maternal depressive symptoms, and adolescent age on youth internalizing symptoms as reported by both the mother and the adolescent. Consistent with hypotheses, maternal depressive symptoms were significantly associated with youth internalizing symptoms (as reported by the adolescent). Further, the impact of maternal religiosity on self-reported youth internalizing symptoms and its subscales was moderated by adolescent age. Specifically, maternal religiosity was associated with fewer self-reported internalizing symptoms in young adolescents, whereas the effect waned in older youth. Possible predictive coprocesses such as maternal influence on adolescent religious choices and identity formation are explored in the context of adolescent internalizing symptomatology. (PsycINFO Database Record

Vertrouwen op Allah

This paper is about religious coping of young Dutch highly educated Muslim women from Moroccan families in their adaptation to Dutch highly secular society. We found in our qualitative research that these young women are confronted with all kinds of problems at home and in Dutch society. They adapt to Dutch values, norms and behaviour. Many of them are very successful in their careers. These young Dutch Muslim women are better able to cope with tensions that are triggered by cultural contradictions, social control, discrimination and racism in Dutch society when they use religious coping strategies. They find peace in positive religious reframing, seeking comfort from Allah, praying, listening to recitation of Koran, and the support of fellow believers. By using religious coping they transform their negative stigma and protect their self-esteem. So the effect of religious coping is that they feel personally better. This gives them strength but also confronts them with social control of fellow believers. This makes it less easy for them to express a deviant religious opinion and to follow their own personal religious choices.

Role of Choice in Women’s Freedom of Religion Claims in Canada

This essay explores whether religious women’s reliance on choice to ground their rights claims may undermine the success of those claims. Canadian courts have interpreted religious freedom under section 2(a) of the Charter to include a strong element of choice. However, some religious choices have not received protection under section 2(a), nor under the section 15 guarantee of equality, particularly those choices that are seen to be the cause of the claimant’s harm or that cause harm to others. Our analysis centres on a case examining a Muslim woman’s freedom to wear a niqab during citizenship ceremonies, situating this case in the broader context of decisions involving women, religious freedom, equality, and choice. These cases confirm insights from the feminist literature about the relationship between choice, agency and autonomy, individualization, and the public/private dichotomy. We conclude that a de-emphasis on choice may be strategic for religious women’s rights claims.

Über das religiöse Verhalten der Munizipalaristokratie von Sarmizegetusa

One can research the religious life and choices of the local aristocrats through the analysis of their private dedications only. The results prove that these people were personally less involved in the imperial cult or in the trendy exotic religions, preferring the Roman deities, mainly Jupiter and the ones defending the home, the welfare and the health.

Perubahan, Kontinuitas, Struktur Musik, Dan Teks Realisasi Nyanyian Buku Ende dan Kidung Jemaat Yamuger

This study used qualitative methods with participant observer to study Continuity and change of Ende Book and Yamuger's Song of the Church is an integral part of church music. Continuity and change by using synchronic and historical diachronic theory. To study the structure of music used the theory of weighted scale, rhythm, and the relationship of music with text. To study the text used semiotic theory. The origins of song and melody texts are from the German Protestant congregation, which is then translated into Batak (Ende's Book) and Indonesian (Yamunger's Song of the Church). On the other hand, there are also direct translations that give rise to differences of etymological and semantic meaning between these three types of chanting. In the context of sosioreligious, Batak language has been very fulfilled into a language of religious choice in worship, to strengthen the social sentiments that cause the emergence of religious emotions and the attainment of the inner atmosphere of the congregation. Among young people the phenomenon above is true, but not in all places or locations of the support community, so the doubt about its loyalty to Ende's Book is undoubtedly not a latent danger. Social sentiment that causes the emergence of religious emotion is still considered strong, but it is expected that there will be a system that will be a benchmark to be able to stay awake.

“How drie a Cinder this world is”: Dissociation of Sensibility Redux

Although T.S. Eliot's phrase “dissociation of sensibility,” applied to the changes in poetry during the seventeenth century, made a stir when he introduced it in the review essay “The Metaphysical Poets” in 1921, it draws less attention now, and seems never to have been adequately explained. Since Eliot's claims are, in part, historical, it makes sense to consider the most historically significant changes occurring during the seventeenth century. It is during this period that the Reformation culminates and its effects become permanently established. Several recent studies of the Reformation by Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory, and Carlos M.N. Eire provide clues about how the religious and social cataclysm of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may have affected the poetic imagination. James Smith's classic essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” offers a way of analyzing the figurative language of seventeenth-century poetry in order to grasp the impact of the religious change. The investigations by Taylor, Gregory, and Eire into the dynamic of the reforming tendency, beginning in the late Middle Ages, as well as the Scotist and nominalist intellectual underpinnings of the Reformation, prove to be pertinent to Eliot's insight regarding seventeenth-century poetry. The growth of individualism, personal anxiety about religious choice, and materialism portend a general movement towards secularization and influence the way poets see the world. Dissociation of sensibility can thus be understood as a result of the effect of the religious and social dislocations of the Reformation in the realm of poetry.

Between Conflict and Negotiation: an Ethnography at the Most Evangelical City in Brazil

This article is based on a research conducted in the city of Abreu e Lima, well known as the most evangelical in Brazil. We choose the school environment as a field of observation from the fact that different researchers have pointed to it as a space where students have contact with religious diversity (Giumbelli 2011) that can lead them to question certain attitudes—such as participation in the June’s parties in the case of non-Catholics (Silva 2011; Campos 2009)—and as a field of specific moral requirements, regarding gender behavior (Perosa 2006; Ribeiro 2006). The initial idea of the research project was to think about the conflict held by Pentecostal girls at school in order to claim a right to demonstrate the characteristics and constraints of their religious choices. If the initial goal of the investigation was to find the conflict generated in this process, the field showed that the path to follow was different. Therefore, our research is committed to understanding the negotiations, understandings and performances carried out by students in the activation, or not, of their religious affiliations in the school. At a time when Brazilian society sees itself as secular and believes that there is a battle between these ideals and “conservative evangelical activism” (Machado, 2012; Campos et al., 2015), it is important to know what is happening in the most evangelical city in the country. Moreover, it is necessary to know how and if these children are being trained to become these activists.

Speaking of Spirits: Oral History, Religious Change, and the Seen and Unseen Worlds of Hmong Americans

This essay argues that oral history allows scholars to see what might otherwise be invisible to them: the gods and spirits that are a forceful presence in the lives of religious people. Oral history changes how scholars write religious history by illuminating how choices of religious belief, practice, and identity are rooted in how religious people understand and interact with an unseen spiritual world. To illustrate this point, this essay focuses on the religious changes experienced by Hmong Americans. Hmong decisions to adopt Christianity or return to indigenous Hmong religion were religious choices that were the product of the constant interaction between Hmong people and the gods that richly populate their spiritual landscape.

МОРАЛЬНЫЙ ВЫБОР КАК ОСНОВА ПОНИМАНИЯ МОРАЛИ (на примере идей С. Кьеркегора и Ф. Ницше)

The article considers two ways of raising the question about the concept of moral choice, carried out by two famous critics of the classical intellectualism in ethics - S. Kierkegaard and F. Nietzsche. The work defines the main contexts for the understanding of moral choice: as associated with the ideas of the overcoming of the abstract nature of the subject of moral choice, as making the emphasis on per-sonality and as based on the idea of increasing self-affirmation of life in opposition to the values of denial of life (Ressentment). The philosophy of Kierkegaard illuminates the theme of moral choice from two points of view: as a phenomenon of the ethical stage of existence, and as characteristic of the religious stage. If the ethical stage defines the moral choice as associated with the choice of these or those moral values, the religious stage is raised from the choice between the Absolute and the items of temporary individual human existence. The position of Nietzsche in relation to understanding the nature of morality is associated with his separation of morality of masters and morality of slaves. If the latter is determined by the sense of Ressentiment, the first is understood through absence of the sense of Ressentiment, and the positing of values “from the” advanced will to power. Resentment is treated in the article in the sense, in which it is defined by Nietzsche in “Genealogy of morality” - as the sense of smoldering resentment at your own weakness and someone else’s strength. The article emphasizes the parallelism between the theme of personal moral/ religious choice in Kierkegaard and the theme of individual autoreflexion struggle with Ressentment as the basis of morality in the view of Nietzsche.

From Salvation to Damnation: Popular Religion in Early America

From Salvation to Damnation:Popular Religion in Early America Janet Moore Lindman (bio) Paul B. Moyer. The Public Universal Friend: Jemima Wilkinson and Religious Enthusiasm of Revolutionary America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. xi + 264 pp. Note on sources, figures, maps, notes, bibliography and index. $27.95. Kathryn Gin Lum. Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. ix + 310 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95. In the introduction to his book, Awash in a Sea of Faith, Jon Butler contends that a plethora of religious choices turned antebellum America into "a unique spiritual hothouse," which was so "complex and heterogeneous" that it "baffle[d] observers and adherents alike."1 In divergent ways, both the books under review here capture the diversity and discordance of popular religion in early American history. The authors present compelling evidence in cogently argued narratives that address the advent of the new nation and its relationship to the emergence, on one hand, of a new religious group (Moyer) and the persistence of a standard component of Christian doctrine (Lum) on the other. Building on previous scholarship that has documented the varied religious repertoire of early Americans (by Catherine Brekus, Jon Butler, David D. Hall, Nathan Hatch, Christine Heyrman, Colleen McCannell, Erik Seeman and a host of others), Moyer and Lum attend to their respective subjects with meticulous and perceptive examinations that will be widely read, debated and cited by future researchers. Both authors are to be commended for extending scholarly knowledge of early American religious history through forceful and substantive arguments. Moyer for his contribution to the history of gender by bringing attention to a well known but often overlooked religious figure and sectarian group, and Lum for her incisive commentary on a prevalent, contested, and meaningful religious concept in early American society. Paul Moyer's book, The Public Universal Friend, explores the life and ministry of Jemima Wilkinson, a young woman from Newport who, after a serious illness in the fall of 1776, awoke to claim that her former self had died, that [End Page 570] she was neither male nor female, and that she had been resurrected as the "Public Universal Friend." Refusing to answer to her birth name, the Friend announced her intention to embark on preaching tours throughout New England to spread her version of the Protestant religion. These trips gathered several converts, who formed a new sect that became known as the Society of Universal Friends. Devised as a microhistory, Moyer's book covers Jemima Wilkinson from her Quaker background and early life in Rhode Island to the onset and expansion of her ministry to her final demise in New York in 1819. Along the way, we learn of the Friend's early ministry and itinerant travels, her growing notoriety and religious leadership, as well as the group's spiritual dynamics, internal conflicts, western migration, and land disputes. But this book is as much about the Friend's followers as its leader. Its chronological focus tracks the group's development and evolution over time from the early days of new converts to the last remnant of the Friend's followers in the 1840s. Each chapter title, taken from the Old Testament, correlates to its topic, e.g., chapter two, on the sect's beginnings and the group's early converts, is called "Numbers." "Exodus," chapter five, discusses the migration of the Universal Friends to central New York, while "Judges," the seventh and final chapter, examines the sect's factionalism, which led to a series of legal battles during the last two decades of Wilkinson's life. Moyer both adds to and expands upon previous scholarship on Jemima Wilkinson by Susan Juster, Catherine Brekus, and Herbert Wiseby. Most notably, Moyer solves the thorny issue of how to refer to Wilkinson the sectarian leader. The author utilizes female pronouns when discussing the Friend's life before her ministry and when providing outsiders' views of Wilkinson; he uses male pronouns to refer to the Public Universal Friend because that was what his followers did and that was how the Friend conceived of his ministerial leadership (I will adopt the same strategy in this essay...

“Being Jew is like Travelling by Bus”: Constructing Jewish Identities in Spain between Individualisation and Group Belonging

Individualisation theory has mainly focused on the deregulation of religion and dissolution of traditional majority churches, but there is less evidence of its appropriateness for religious minorities. In this paper I contribute to this debate by analysing how Jews in Spain construct their Jewish sense of belonging in the context of a diverse, traditionally Catholic society. My main argument is that Jews, as a small and invisible minority, confronted by the exigencies of a secular and plural context, combine notions of religious choice and ethnic ascription in narrating their individual and collective identities. Consequently, while the theory of individualisation partly accounts for this identity construction, the specificities of the context and the minority condition require additional conceptual tools about collective identities and symbolic boundaries.

Religion as Identity

Abstract This paper examines the shift in how religious freedom is understood from a matter of protecting individual choice to a matter identity. According to the choice approach, the state must protect the individual’s freedom to choose but it cannot be expected to bear the costs of the religious choices citizens make. The identity approach treats the claims individuals and groups make about their religious commitments as non-negotiable facts rather than choices and considers the failure of the state to protect these commitments as unjust because it exposes the individual to disrespect and disadvantage, and stigmatizes and excludes them from full membership in the polity. This paper examines the political context in which the identity approach has emerged in the last 50 years. It then examines three implications of this shift from choice to identity for the protection of religious freedom. Such a shift 1) enhances the capacity of courts to address claims of historical injustice, 2) leads courts to focus on the religious practices of groups rather than individuals, and 3) increases the pressure on courts to assess the authenticity of religious beliefs and practices. These implications lead to significant challenges for public institutions, which are discussed in the final section of the paper.

Jesuits and Jansenists. The religious choices of the merchants in eighteenth-century France

Au xviiie siecle, les manifestations d’engagement devot jouent un role crucial au sein d’elites marchandes qu’on decrit volontiers comme gagnees sinon aux Lumieres, du moins a une privatisation et a une interiorisation du croire. A rebours de cette « fidelite passive », l’accent est ici mis sur le sens et la motivation de gestes exprimant publiquement un soutien en faveur des jansenistes ou des jesuites. Les traces en sont nombreuses : legs, hebergement, participation au culte du diacre Paris, participation aux sociabilites liees aux colleges ou noviciats jesuites ou a des confreries, propos tenus dans les livres de raison ou les ecrits du fors prive, etc. Ces orientations partisanes ne traduisent pas l’adhesion intellectuelle a une doctrine qui serait en conformite avec les interets d’une classe marchande. Elles sont plutot le resultat d’interactions sociales, situees a la fois localement et chronologiquement, et structurent puissamment les relations entrepreneuriales et de travail. Au-dela de pratiques parfois opportunistes, parfois sinceres, ces choix illustrent la difficulte a singulariser le religieux au sein d’une description des groupes sociaux.

Faith and religious attendance in Brazil

One of the most interesting rational religious choice models is that presented by Durkin and Greeley in a 1991 article. The authors base the problem of uncertainty of religious choice on Pascal’s Wager as a maximization problem of expected benefit and in faith as an insurance. The objective of the present article is to test the Durkin and Greeley hypothesis model for Brazil. Two dependent variables were used in the tests: religious attendance and faith, as in Durkin and Greeley’s original model, and resulted in a highly significant relation. The belief in an after-life had a positive and significant impact on the dependent variable degree of faith. In the case of the tests of the third and last hypothesis of the model, that is, religious attendance and faith are positively related to the religious capital accumulated by the individual, ambiguous results were observed in relation to the confirmation of that hypothesis. An unexpected result turned up: the more conservative the individual showed himself or herself in relation to abortion, the lower was his or her degree of faith and lower was his or her religious frequency.

Ecclesial Dissent in Italy in the Sixties

In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, Italian bishops influenced by the teachings of the Council believed the Church should be involved more actively in the plight of the poor. Similarly, some Catholic organizations in Italy decided to withdraw their electoral support from the Democrazia Cristiana, thus making a religious choice. The reactions to these changes were neither few nor slow in coming, as was shown by the positions of some cardinals and the rise of movements committed to defending tradition.

The Contemporary Religious Marketplace in China and the Role of Rational Choice Theory

In spite of the state‐sanctioned restrictions on religion following the Cultural Revolution and the relaxed, albeit still limiting, policy in 1979, religion has continued to persist in Chinese culture through inventive practices. Religious adherents partake in a unique religious marketplace, in which choice is curtailed by political bans. However, religiosity has maneuvered through such sanctions, producing an unusual market and suggesting an inherent sociological drive towards forming religious community. Rational choice theory suggests a theory of religious economy in which a supply and demand model determines the success or failure of particular religious traditions. Through access to a religious marketplace in a religiously pluralistic society, religious ‘consumers’ may select religions which fulfill their expectations and spiritual needs. While the model of the religious marketplace is credible in regards to the North American religious situation, rational choice theory in contemporary China requires a more complex model. Due to historical restrictions on Chinese religious practice, a religious market was rendered temporarily invisible, thus creating innovative religious choices and options for Chinese communities. This has resulted in a ‘tripartite religious market’, as described in the work of Fenggang Yang. Through Yang’s work, we can understand China as maintaining a religious marketplace which looks dissimilar to that of North America. By viewing the Chinese market through the lens of rational choice theory, it is clear that religion and religious choice has thrived in China in a new sociological mechanism.

Старообрядческие Общины Северного Кавказа Во Второй Половине XIX - Начале XX Вв (Old Belief Communities of the North Caucasus in the Second Half of XIX - The Beginning of the XX Centuries)

Russian Abstract: Вторая половина XIX в. в Российской империи была временем не только Великих реформ, но и временем, когда ставились вопросы отделения Церкви от государства, уравнения в правах всех исповеданий, предоставления подданным права свободного религиозного выбора. Эти проблемы затрагивали не только приверженцев «иностранных исповеданий» (католиков, протестантов, мусульман, буддистов), но и тех, кто отделился от государственной Церкви, -старообрядцев и сектантов.English Abstract: The second half of the XIX century in the Russian Empire was time not only Great reforms, but also time when questions of separation of Church from the state, an equalization of rights of all confessions, providing the right of a free religious choice to citizens were raised. These issues were touched not only adherents of foreign confessions (Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Buddhists), but also those who separated from the state Church - Old Believers and sectarians.