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 The relationship between spirituality, religion and medicine has been recognized since antiquity. Despite large differences in their history, society, economy and cultures human communities shared a common belief that spirituality and religion played an important role in the healing of diseases. METHODS The study of religious remedies used by Italian folk medicine in order to treat...

This article attempts to address the lack of terminology concerning the long-standing but often overlooked relationship between religion and entertainment in Japan, arguing that these two seemingly discrete and opposing fields are often conflated. Examining the underlying thought behind the animation films of director Miyazaki Hayao, and investigating audience responses to those works, the arti...

BACKGROUND Quality end-of-life care depends on understanding patients' end-of-life choices. Individuals and cultures may hold end-of-life priorities at different hierarchy. Forced ranking rather than independent rating, and by-person factor analysis rather than averaging may reveal otherwise masked typologies. METHODS We explored Saudi males' forced-ranked, end-of-life priorities and dis-prio...

The flourishing lucrative business of Umrah pilgrimage in Indonesia has disrupted pilgrims from the substantial meaning as a form worship. travel industry designs some umrah packages merely commonplace pack­ages, instead devoted In­nu­merable number agents relent­less­ly promote attractive for at an affordable price using any possible marketing strategies to win customers, attempts which downgr...