Religious and sacred art: Recent psychological perspectives

Sacrifi ce and Sacred Values: Evolutionary Perspectives on Religious Terrorism

Evolutionary theories of religion and sacred values are essential for understanding current trends in terrorist activity. We clarify religion’s role in facilitating terror and outline recent theoretical developments that focus on four cross-culturally recurrent features of religion: communal participation in costly ritual, belief in supernatural agents and counterintuitive concepts, separation ...

Signaling, Solidarity, and the Sacred: The Evolution of Religious Behavior

Many challenges confront evolutionary scholars of religion. The origins and adaptive value of religion and the conditions that selected for its evolution are difficult to discern. Patterns of religious behavior, like other areas of human social behavior, have undergone significant change over our evolutionary history. Evans-Pritchard1 argued that dramatic historical changes in religious behavio...

Religious perspectives on assisted suicide.

Religious experience: perspectives and research paradigms

The subject of religious experience has been marginalised in the social sciences. Although authors such as James (1903) have suggested that religious experience is pre-cultural and pre-cognitive, this paper argues against the perennialist position, suggesting instead that religious experience and its narration are both socially constructed. The ideological role of religious experience is discus...

Menominee perspectives on commercial and sacred tobacco use.

The Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin has the highest smoking rate in the state. To address the resultant health disparities, the tribe conducted a qualitative pilot project to examine tobacco use. The findings indicated mainstream models of addiction did not capture the tribe's context well; the Indigenist Stress-Coping Model was most applicable. Participants suggested that Menominee-centric...