Contemporary China offers a particularly interesting setting to study religious diversity as a result of its unique socio-political context. Based on the quantitative and qualitative evidence in a representative sample of Chinese dissertations, this essay identifies two characteristics associated with the usage of ‘religious diversity’ in contemporary Chinese scholarship: firstly, the focal poi...

BACKGROUND Hopelessness is a strong predictor of suicide which is closely associated with PTSD in war veterans. Previous studies showed that if religious faith in war veterans was weakened it contributed to more extensive current use of mental health services. War trauma experience can weaken religious faith as well as strengthen it. It partly depends on religious coping which can be positive o...

In the United States, charitable contributions can be deducted from taxable income making the price of giving inversely related to the marginal tax rate. The existing literature documents that charitable giving is very responsive to tax subsidies, but often ignores the spillover effects of such policies. This paper investigates the spillover effects of charitable subsidies on religious particip...

OBJECTIVE To examine the directionality of associations between self-reported religious importance or worship attendance and depression among adolescents, and to determine whether social supports or general self-efficacy are mechanisms of observed associations. METHOD A cohort (n = 976) of Canadian high school students were surveyed in Grade 10 (2000 to 2001) and 2 years later (2002 to 2003)....

The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) abolished its total ban on religious activities in 1982. However, the distrust that the CCP feels for religions remains obvious today, and the religious restrictions in contemporary China remain tight. Conventional wisdom tells us that the official atheist ideology of Marxism-Leninism is the main reason behind the CCP’s distrust for, and restriction of, ...

Managing one’s identity across time and through major life changes is a key process in the life course. Yet, prominent theories of identity have not been adequately tested across age groups and through life transitions. Using longitudinal data from the National Study of Youth and Religion (N = 3,290), the basic hypotheses of identity theory are confirmed in explaining adolescents’ religious ide...

Previous literature on religion and sexual behavior has focused on narrow definitions of religiosity, including religious affiliation, religious participation, or forms of religiousness (e.g., intrinsic religiosity). Trends toward more permissive premarital sexual activity in the North American Christian-Judeo religion support the secularization hypothesis of religion, which posits an increasin...

Economics and Religion This paper provides an overview of the relationship between economics and religion. It first considers the effects of economic incentives in the religious marketplace on consumers’ demand for “religion.” It then shows how this demand affects religious institutions and generates a supply of religious goods and services. Other topics include the structure of this religious ...

Vaccination is considered to be one of the greatest public health achievements in the 20th century, which has helped to build a society free of vaccine preventable diseases and save lives of millions children across the globe (1). However, in the 21st century, pediatric practice in the western world witnesses an era of vaccination refusal (2). Pediatricians, infectious disease experts, and publ...

We propose an integrative cognitive neuroscience framework for understanding the cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief. Our analysis reveals 3 psychological dimensions of religious belief (God's perceived level of involvement, God's perceived emotion, and doctrinal/experiential religious knowledge), which functional MRI localizes within networks processing Theory of Mind regardin...