Fighting for not-So-Religious souls: The role of religious competition in secular conflicts.

The Secular Benefits of Comparative Religious Education

The Secular Physician and the Religious Patient: Overcoming Religious Discordance in the Clinical Setting

Deciding how best to respond to a patient’s spiritual devotion can raise complex ethical challenges. This is particularly true for medical students and residents who may have little formal training in the area of religion and spirituality. This article explores the challenges inherent to the encounter between a secular physician or medical trainee and a religious patient. A clinical vignette is...

The Use of Religious Coping Methods in a Secular Society

In the present article, based on results from a survey study in Sweden among 2,355 cancer patients, the role of religion in coping is discussed. The survey study, in turn, was based on earlier findings from a qualitative study of cancer patients in Sweden. The purpose of the present survey study was to determine to what extent results obtained in the qualitative study can be applied to a wider ...

Religious-Secular Cleavage and Political Stability in Israel

Due to its artificial and unnatural structure, Israeli society has since the beginning of its establishment, been a context for the emergence of different kinds of cleavages and tensions. This state of affairs has endangered the political stability of the Israeli regime. The present research is trying to answer this question: what is the effect of religious-secular cleavages in Israel on the fu...

Religious Ritual and Cooperation: Testing for a Relationship on Israeli Religious and Secular Kibbutzim

Anthropologists have long noted that one of the primary functions of religion is to promote group solidarity, and most have recognized ritual as the mechanism through which this solidarity is achieved. Guided by Durkheim (1995 [1912]), who was among the first to appreciate the unifying nature of religious ritual, functionalists have explored how ritual sustains the social order within a communi...