Special Religious Education (SRE) classes are held in New South Wales public primary schools weekly. This article is built on a review of SRE based Anglican past experiences to develop recommendations ameliorate shortcomings and enhance their quality value post-secular society. The research was literature study evaluative interpretation from the newly emerged context. It described discussed his...

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...

In 1907 Freud (1941) was the first to note a similarity between religious and obsessive-compulsive behaviors, which he emphasized as the individual’s “private religion.” Other investigators (Akhtar et al., 1975) have suggested that obsessions and compulsions are culture-specific, with a crossover to religious behavior. Greenberg and Witztum (Greenberg and Witztum, 1994;Greenberg, 1984) discusse...

Why did conversion to Christianity take place in some Asian areas and not others? What happened when sacred and religious texts from Abrahamic traditions, especially Christianity, were translated into Chinese? What were the effects when the secular and the religious were asserted to be separate realms? What were the consequences for ideas about the private, the public, and the state? How did re...

Prior research has found mixed evidence for the long-theorized link between religiosity and pro-social behavior. To help overcome this divergence, I hypothesize that pro-social behavior is linked not to religiosity per se, but rather to the salience of religion and religious norms. I report a field experiment that examined when auction participants will respond to an appeal to continue bidding ...

The decline in religious identification and corresponding increase in the unaffiliated has been one of the most important religious changes in the United Kingdom (UK). The emergence of the “religious nones” is the most obvious sign of continuing secularization and the declining social and cultural relevance of religion. Yet while the religiously-unaffiliated often form the plurality — if not so...

After long neglect, the subject of religion has received growing attention in the economics profession over the past two decades. One of the reasons is that it has proven diffi cult to explain the levels of economic development of many nations around the world without reference to a national culture, and many of these cultures have been signifi cantly infl uenced by religion. Contrary to a wide...

Do non-religious adults - despite their explicit disavowal of religious beliefs - have a tacit tendency to view nature as purposefully created by some being? This question was explored in three online studies using a speeded judgment procedure, which assessed disbelievers in two different Western cultures (United States and Finland). Despite strong performance on control trials, across all thre...