Religious Emphasis Research Articles

Development and Validation of Ikhlaas Scale for Pakistani Muslim Adults.

Ikhlaas refers to the capacity of having sincere intentions in both acts of worship (ibadah) dedicated to God and our dealings with others, as we strive to seek God's pleasure. The present research was primarily conducted to develop a psychometrically sound measure of ikhlaas and establish its construct validity. Using an exploratory sequential mixed methods design, it comprised two studies. Study 1 was conducted in three phases. In Phase 1, an initial set of 17 items for the Ikhlaas Scale (IS) was developed through the thematic analysis of Quranic verses, semi-structured interviews, and focus group discussions. Phase 2 was related to the translation and cross-language validation of scales. Phase 3 involved administering this item pool to a sample of Pakistani Muslim adults (N = 300) and conducting an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) that revealed a two-factor structure (item loading 0.45-0.89) for the 12-item IS, accounting for 43.65% of the variance. The first factor measured ikhlaas in worship (7 items), while the second factor measured ikhlaas in dealings with others (5 items). Ikhlaas had a significant positive correlation with taqwa and significant negative correlations with materialism, providing evidence for the convergent validity of the IS. In Study 2, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) conducted on a sample of Muslim adults (N = 702) confirmed the 12-item, two-factor structure of the IS observed in the EFA. Ikhlas was positively related to religious commitment and religious emphasis. In the final measurement model, the average variance extracted (AVE) of all constructs (ikhlaas, religious emphasis, and religious commitment) was > 0.50, the values of maximum shared variance (MSV) were lower than those of AVE, and the diagonal values of the square root of the AVE were higher than the intercorrelations. The heterotrait-monotrait correlation ratio (HTMT) ranged from 0.51 to 0.61, which testified to the discriminant validity of IS. Overall, the IS is a robust measure of ikhlaas that needs to be further studied for developing its nomological network across global Muslim populations.

An Exploratory Study of the Trait "Friendliness and Gregariousness" In the Religious Domain and their Relation to Human Well-being

This research investigates the characteristics of "Friendliness and Gregariousness "in the context of religion and their complex relationships to the welfare of people. The study emphasizes how crucial friendliness and gregariousness are to promoting healthy social dynamics. The intricate ways in which these characteristics are expressed within religious frameworks are revealed by the qualitative content analysis. By analyzing how the religious emphasis on friendliness and gregariousness coincides with scientific evidence on the positive effects of social connectivity on mental and emotional health, the research bridges the gap between religious beliefs and contemporary psychology theories. The study aims to contribute significant new data to the growing corpus of knowledge regarding the connection between friendliness and well-being by employing an interdisciplinary approach. The purpose of the study is to identify timeless principles that may lead people in many cultural and religious contexts toward a more satisfying and harmonious existence by investigating the universality of these features across different religious traditions.

Revisiting a Sabbatian Controversy: Moses Ḥayim Luzzatto and a Multiplicity of Rabbinates in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract: News that Moses @Hayim Luzzatto (ca. 1707–ca. 1746) was the recipient of heavenly revelations touched off a controversy that engulfed European rabbinic networks for several years. Led by Moses Hagiz, Jewish religious leaders far and wide condemned Luzzatto and his mystical messianic group as heretical. However, the Luzzatto controversy was far more complicated than merely a case of the rabbinic establishment suppressing a heretical thinker. Responses varied in enthusiasm, denunciation, and ambivalence, reflecting a rabbinic culture impacted by age, ethnicity, family, geography, ideology, and social networks. Opinions and alliances shifted, criticism levied at Luzzatto and his group in Padua proved idiosyncratic, and Luzzatto began and ended his short but prodigious career as a celebrated rabbinic author. The broad spectrum of responses to Luzzatto indicates a need to reassess notions of the rabbinate, heresy, and spiritual leadership and consider the interplay between local and pan-Jewish identities. This essay discusses how intercommunal relationships and rabbinic autonomy played a role in the developments, and how variegated responses to the controversy revealed a wide range of social and religious emphases in early modern Jewish culture.

Cultural and Religious Perspectives on Education of Saudi Arabia

In this composition, the intricacies of the relationship between culture and education in Saudi Arabia are analyzed and its implications for students from early education to higher learning are evaluated. The examination delves into the manner in which Islam and the country's customary gender roles shape the syllabus and educational customs. The inculcation of Qur'anic teachings and Hadith, as well as the propagation of Wahhabi principles, are integral facets of religion's influence on the nation's educational structure. The segregation of academic institutions by gender, stringent dress codes, and strict observance of behavioral codes are exemplars of the impact of religion on education. Additionally, the cultural and religious emphasis on gender roles is pronounced through the stringent separation of schools and the reinforcement of cultural and religious norms in society. The religious curriculum and instructional materials are rigorously scrutinized to guarantee their conformity to the government's interpretation of Islam. The report accentuates both the difficulties and prospects that the cultural and educational landscape presents for students, educators, and education professionals in Saudi Arabia.

“A Monster of iniquity in my self”: Queer Sacramental Temporality in Thomas Shepard and Michael Wigglesworth

Abstract This article contends, through a reading of Thomas Shepard and Michael Wigglesworth, that puritan devotional practice contains a queer temporality that emphasizes the recurrent experience and recording of personal sinfulness. This queer temporality, articulated in puritan devotional literature in sacramental terms, poses an important challenge to the secularization account Charles Taylor offers in which puritan religious emphasis on righteous conduct leads to ultimately secular projects of social and individual reform.

Eastern Orthodoxy in the processes of the post-communist political transformations

It is a sort of truism in the social sciences that since the late 1970s the world has been witnessing the great return of religion into global politics and international relations. Paradigm shift in theorists’ concepts and practitioners’ perception of previously underestimated dimension were tremendously influenced by the chain of events signaled the new role of religion in politics, and among them by the explosive religious revival in countries where the Eastern Orthodoxy was the majority religion which started even well before the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia. Eastern Orthodoxy is the major religious denomination in 12 European countries, all but two of which (Greece and Cyprus) are former communist states. In this perspective , reasoning over Orthodoxy’s destiny is to greater extent reasoning over the post-communist political development as a phenomenon. Article proves that Eastern Orthodoxy provided post-communist states with symbolism and common ideological ground for both leftists and rightists, former communists and former dissenters, and extended a symbolic framework to the so-called Soviet people who lost the sense of belonging and were searching for their new identity. Orthodox Churches that saw itself and were widely perceived as the historic repository of nationhood, national values, and, quite often, as the savior of a nation's very existence, suggested itself as a main actor in the process of new identity building. Orthodoxy became the primary vehicle for the awakening of collective identity for the groups surrounded by or competed with groups of different religions. This trend was very clear in some of the episodes which marked the first postcommunist decade. Conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, the northern Caucasus and Transcaucasia were given a strong religious emphasis and religion was rapidly turned into the factor of political and national mobilization. At the same time, the aspiration of the newly independent states to gain the independence of their churches from Moscow and Belgrade has created an additional powerful geopolitical source of tension. While the process of bestowing Autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in Ukraine that met with fierce resistance from the Russian state, showed how far Russia could go to maintain ecclesiastical control over Ukraine. And also, what is the role of Orthodoxy as a symbolic and institutional resource in contemporary political processes. Key words: religion and politics, Eastern Orthodoxy, Post-Communist transformations

Predictors of Sex Anxiety: Emphasis on Religion in Childhood, Religious Values, and Family Communication

Little is known or understood about which factors relate to sex anxiety. Specifically, there is a gap in the literature on the relationship of sex anxiety to an individual’s religious emphasis and values pertaining to monotheistic religions. The purpose of this study was to explore a potential relationship between emphasis on religious values during childhood, current religious values, and caregiver-child conversations regarding sex and anxiety surrounding sex acts and practices. It was hypothesized that increased emphasis placed on religious practices during childhood, lower family sex communication, and high religious values would correlate to high levels of sex anxiety. The findings indicate limited family communications about sex and religious emphasis during childhood as statistically significant contributors to the variance in sex anxiety. Current religious beliefs did not contribute to the variance in sex anxiety. The relationships between sex anxiety, family communication, and emphasis on religion during childhood reinforce the impact of community socialization and the importance of early education. Implications for researchers, advocates, religious or community leaders, and care providers are discussed.

Family Environment in relation to Emotional Autonomy among Adolescents of Rural Area of Jammu City

One important feature of adolescents is autonomous learning skills that will help them manage their own lives and make positive, healthy choices. Autonomy is a crucial developmental task of adolescence, mainly because it is closely linked to individualization and identity formation. Families that are perceived as cohesive have high sense of security and emerge as a source of support for individuals. Results states the significant negative correlation of moral religious emphasis with parent perceives as people (r= -.154), and control (r= -.218) positive relationship with independence (r=.175). Deidealization have a significant negative relationship with intellectual cultural orientation (r = -.157) and positive significant relationships with cohesion (r = .203), expressiveness (r = .168), independence (r = .165), achievement orientation (r = .151), active recreational orientation (r = .220). Non dependency has a significant negative relationship with intellectual cultural orientation (r = -.193) and organization (r = -.140). Similarly, individuation dimension of emotional autonomy has a significant relationship with conflict (r = -.144) in male adolescents. Among female adolescents, parent perceives as people correlates with cohesion (r= .264), expressiveness (r= .141), achievement orientation (r= .330), organization (r= .176). De-idealization dimension of emotional autonomy correlates positively with independence (r= .151), moral religious emphasis (r= .147), control (r= .182). Non dependency dimension of emotional autonomy have a significant negative relationship with intellectual cultural orientation (r= -.170), moral religious emphasis (r= -.209). Expressiveness (r= .172), conflict (r= .183), independence (r= .140) are significantly positively related with non dependency and achievement orientation (r = .187) and conflict (r = -.247) with individuation in female adolescents.

The composition and distribution of the legal profession, and the use of law in Britain and Ireland, c.1500-c.1850

Summary The geography of the legal profession and legal culture, and the possibility that there were major regional differences in the use of law and legal institutions across historic Europe have been little studied by historians. This article compares England and Wales with Scotland, whose private law was different, and Ireland, where English common law worked alongside indigenous law traditions. Lawyers can be divided between those who pleaded and those who prepared documents, but the nomenclature and professional development of ‘men of law’ differed considerably within the component parts of Britain and Ireland. The article brings out these differences and, in so doing, hopes to provide a framework for comparing the place of the legal profession and the use of law over space and time. It is in two parts. The first explores the changing numbers of different sorts of legal practitioner in England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland: barristers, solicitors/attorneys, advocates, writers, and notaries. From an early date, England and Wales had many more lawyers per head of population than other parts of what became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; the legal profession was dominated by attorneys, who far outnumbered barristers, whereas in Scotland and Ireland those who pleaded formed a significant proportion of all men of law. The second part seeks to explain this difference, by examining how different societies related to the formal practices of law and to alternative forms of dispute resolution. The component parts of the British Isles had distinctive social structures, economic compositions, religious emphases, and cultural forms, which meant that the place of law and lawyers in their societies varied considerably. The argument is that, as well as having different legal institutions and professional structures, Scottish and Irish people used the law more selectively than their English (and perhaps also Welsh) equivalents.

A brief history of family life education in Romania

Starting from the state of conceptual diversity, semantic ambiguity, and poor connection of family life education practices to current policies and theoretical models in Romania, our study aims at understanding the underlying meanings of these issues by recourse to the history of approaches in the field. To this purpose, we carried out a qualitative historical research, based on the thematic analysis of a set of educational works produced between the sixteenth century, when the first Romanian texts were written, and the present time. Primary historical sources are supplemented with reliable secondary sources, while the criteria used for the selection of texts were their relevance to family life education (FLE), and the notoriety of the works in the corresponding historical periods. As in western countries, the concept of FLE was coined in Romania at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the family education discourse was outlined, but the roots of the field can be traced even in the first printed texts. Although marked by strong moral and religious emphases during pre-modernity, FLE has entered the slow process of secularisation and evolved from the perspective of political, social, and moral reconstruction goals of modern Romania. However, FLE’s goals and contents were redefined during Communism, and the discrepancies between discourses, practices, and realities compromised the functionality of the pedagogical model promoted at the time. A unitary definition of FLE in relation to Romanian contemporary families’ needs requires reconciliation with historical, cultural, and educational premises, as well as a careful contextualisation of western models and practices.

A Negative Flynn Effect in Kuwait: The same effect as in Europe but with seemingly different causes

The results of two previously published Arabic language administrations of the Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM) are compared. The first is an administration of the SPM in 2006 to a probability sample of 6529 Kuwaitis aged between 8 and 15 from all regions of Kuwait. The second is an administration to a comparable sample of 6431 Kuwaitis in 2015. We find a significant Negative Flynn Effect in each age cohort and an overall Negative Flynn Effect amounting to a loss of 6.2 points in a decade. Possible reasons for this are discussed. It is proposed that the most persuasive explanation is increasing religious emphasis in the Kuwaiti school curriculum.

Correlation between Family Environment and Self Esteem of Adolescents

The present investigation attempted to find out the correlation between the family environment and self esteem of adolescents. The study was conducted on 200 adolescents (100 male and 100 female) studying in various educational institutes located in Bathinda. For data collection Family Environment Scale and Self Esteem Scale were used. For the data analysis various statistical techniques were used. Statistical techniques used were Pearson’s product moment correlation and t-test were used. Pearson’s product moment correlation was used to determine the correlation between different dimensions of family environment scale i.e. Cohesion, Expressiveness, Conflict, Independence, Achievement Orientation, Intellectual Cultural Orientation, Active Recreational Orientation, Moral Religious Emphasis, Organization and control with the self-esteem of adolescents. The results of the investigation shows that their exist no gender differences in the mean scores of all the ten dimensions of family environment and even no gender differences exist in the mean score scores of self esteem of adolescents. Further co-relational analysis revealed that self esteem is positively correlated to Moral Religious Emphasis and negatively correlated to conflict dimension of family environment. The results indicated a clear correlation between family environment and self esteem of adolescents.

Parents’ and Adolescents’ Attitudes about Parental Involvement in Clinical Research

Study ObjectiveTo understand parent and adolescent attitudes toward parental involvement during clinical trials and factors related to those attitudes. DesignAs part of a study on willingness to participate in a hypothetical microbicide study, adolescents and their parents were interviewed separately. SettingAdolescent medicine clinics in New York City. ParticipantsThere were 301 dyads of adolescents (ages 14-17 years; 62% female; 72% Hispanic) and their parents. InterventionsNone. Main Outcome MeasuresThe interview included questions on demographic characteristics, sexual history, and family environment (subscales of the Family Environment Scale) that were associated with attitudes about parental involvement. ResultsFactor analysis of the parental involvement scale yielded 2 factors: LEARN, reflecting gaining knowledge about study test results and behaviors (4 items) and PROCEDURE, reflecting enrollment and permissions (4 items). Adolescents endorsed significantly fewer items on the LEARN scale and the PROCEDURE scale indicating that adolescents believed in less parental involvement. There was no significant concordance between adolescents and their own parents on the LEARN scale and the PROCEDURE scale. In final multivariate models predicting attitudes, adolescents who were female and had sexual contact beyond kissing, and non-Hispanic parents had lower LEARN scores. Adolescents who were older, had previous research experience, and reported less moral or religious emphasis in their family had lower PROCEDURE scores; there were no significant predictors for parents in the multivariate analyses. ConclusionParents wanted greater involvement in the research process than adolescents. Recruitment and retention might be enhanced by managing these differing expectations.

Milton's Areopagitica in the Arab World Today

This paper places Milton's opinions on freedom of expression, in particular his seminal prose work, Areopagitica, into the context of the Arab world today. Areopagitica was translated into Arabic only very recently (2009) by Mohamed Enani. This study analyses the relevance of Milton's arguments about liberty in light of Egypt's current protocols with regard to book publication, and the ongoing political and social fluctuations occurring in the region. It also compares Milton's civil war context with the political and social rhetoric present in Egypt's increasingly polarised society. Through philological analyses of the translation's linguistic and religious emphases, it will be established that Areopagitica has a potential relevance not only to the sociopolitical contexts of the region, but also to the Arab world's prevailing Islamic culture. At its core, Islamic teaching emphasises the importance of both scripture and freedom. As a result, reading is an important Islamic activity, and allows the religion to be perceived as a complete way of life, concerned with both religious and worldly issues. Milton's tract touches on ideas of “religious and civil wisdom”, linking such wisdom with “discovery” and “freedoms”. While such ideas seem to match aspects of Islamic belief, this paper considers how we are to understand such issues when literacy rates of Muslim majority countries remain lower than the global average, and when censorship is in many ways rife in media, as well as in works of fiction and non-fiction. This study provides numerous links between Milton's tract and the Arab world today, drawing attention to the poet's perhaps surprising relevance to the region. It also shows how such comparisons point us towards the relevance of Milton's other works, namely his epic poem Paradise Lost, and a number of his sonnets.

Theories of Reason in China and the West: From the Point of View of the Enlightenment

A conception of enlightenment that is new in both origin and prototype yet rooted in Chinese tradition can be found in the works of Liang Shuming and Zhu Qianzhi, his follower in the historical field. Kant maintained that enlightenment implied that the power of reason would give man the courage to use his mind. Similarly, Zhu Qianzhi used enlightenment to define reason, putting the focus of enlightenment on religion. In doing so, on the one hand, he neglected the richness, complexity and inner evolution of the Western concept of reason; on the other hand, like Hegel, he dismissed the subtle but significant differences between Chinese and Western concepts of reason. In terms of thought, intuition, emotion, desire, practice, skill and the movements of nature, reason in the Western tradition inevitably tends toward the good. The word later used to translate “reason” into Chinese had already appeared in Confucian and Buddhist classics. Reason in Song and Ming Confucianism is an all- embracing absolute; its function involves intuition, thought and emotion, all directed toward the good. Liang Shuming accepted the differentiation between reason and understanding of Western philosophy, but proposed that understanding was the function and reason the essence of the heart-mind. Overall, this represents only the heart-mind approach. The non- religious character, didactic tendency and emphasis on intuition in the Confucian view of reason can all be found in the Confucian theory of emotion. Being essentially a response to good and evil, emotion may share some common ground with classical Western philosophy.

School-based Character Education in the United States

Character education has been a part of schooling in the United States since the early years of its public education system. Starting with a religious emphasis on moral development, character education eventually transformed into more secular approaches, like the values clarification model, character word-of-the-month approach, performance approach, and finally into social emotional learning approaches. These approaches are reflective of the changes occurring in the social, cultural, and economic spheres of the country, which eventually blurred the lines between the moral and performance (the socio-cultural and economic) aspects of character development. This article provides a contextual glimpse of the processes shaping character education in the United States, indicating the universality of the social dimensions involved.

With God on One's Side: The Social Geometry of Death Row Apologies

Apology is an increasingly prominent form of conflict management in many areas of social life. Yet there are few systematic studies of apology as a dependent variable. Analyzing the last statements of Texas death row prisoners, we find that the best predictor of apology is affiliation with God. Under traditional Western conceptions, God is an actor endowed with extraordinarily high status. Drawing on the theoretical paradigm known as pure sociology, we argue that death row prisoners who invoke God as a third party in their conflict thereby elevate their own status. Greater vertical closeness to the victim's side generates more social assertiveness and a greater willingness to apologize publicly. In addition, affiliation increases prisoners' relational closeness to God, enhancing their probability of adopting God's modern message of reconciliation. God's status has, however, declined somewhat over the past several centuries—a trend that helps to explain the modern religious emphasis on reconciliation over punishment, apology over defiance.

Relationship between Occupational Stress and Family Environment among Under-Graduate Women Teachers

The present study reports level of the relationship between occupational stress and family environment of undergraduate women teachers. A total of 264 women teachers working on permanent and temporary basis belonging to different age groups were randomly selected for the study. They were administered occupational stress scale and family environment scale, consisting of 46 and 90 items, respectively measuring occupational stress and family environment in 12 and 10 dimensions, respectively. The occupational stress was measured in the following subscale role overload, role ambiguity, role conflict, unreasonable group and political pressure, responsibility for persons, under participation, powerless. The family environment was measured in the following dimensions–cohesion, expressiveness, conflict, independence, achievement orientation, intellectual orientation, active recreational, moral religious emphasis, organisation and control. Data were subjected to stepwise multiple regression to find out the relationship between occupational stress and family environment. Results revealed that only two components of FES best predicted the occupational stress of the teachers, they are-conflict and achievement orientation.

Robes, fiery crosses, and the american the materiality of the 1920s' klan's patriotism, and intolerance

ABSTRACTRobes, fiery crosses, and the American flag were all material objects of the 1920s' Ku Klux Klan, and the order's artifacts, specifically its material religion, are suspiciously absent from Klan historiography. The Klan's religious nation, its Protestant America, became tangible, in its artifacts, and the order's intolerance emerges as a crucial component of the Klan's religious and national identity. This article explores not only the importance of objects in the 1920s' Klan and the religious and national emphases of the order's origins but also the theological and patriotic content of three Klan artifacts (the robes, the American flag, and the fiery cross). I argue that material religion and intolerance holds a central place in the 1920s' Klan as well as the contemporary Klan movement and assessing material objects allows us to engage more fully the exclusivist presentations of faith and nation in American nationalism.

The creator, human conduct and the maximisation of utility in Gossen's economic theory

Herman Gossen's book is usually praised for its contribution to the mathematisation of economics and the obsessive presence of religious references is unduly left out. This paper takes both dimensions seriously and explains how the religious emphasis is crucial for a historical and theoretical understanding of Gossen's view on maximisation of utility and the government of rational and selfish human beings.