The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a new theoretically based measure that would assess the full range of religious coping methods, including potentially helpful and harmful religious expressions. The RCOPE was tested on a large sample of college students who were coping with a significant negative life event. Factor analysis of the RCOPE in the college sample yielded factors ...

Although most people are religious, there are hundreds of millions of religious disbelievers in the world. What is religious disbelief and how does it arise? Recent developments in the scientific study of religious beliefs and behaviors point to the conclusion that religious disbelief arises from multiple interacting pathways, traceable to cognitive, motivational, and cultural learning mechanis...

The current study attempted to examine the religious maturity of Hindu (N=1050), Christian (N=1073) and Muslim (N=1394) adolescents studying at secondary level in Pakistan. This research is based on the theory of religious orientations presented by Allpport (1950). Age universal I-E scale (revised version of ROS – Religious Orientation Scale) developed by Kirkpatrick (1988) and Maltby (1999) wa...

How are the Big Two personality dimensions of agency (e.g., competence, uniqueness, ambition) and communion (e.g., warmth, relatedness, morality) related to religiosity? A standard view assumes that communion encourages religiosity, whereas agency is independent of religiosity. Our model is more nuanced, taking into account the Big Two’s motivational base as well as culture: Because communal in...

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...

This paper attempts to explain several empirical findings regarding religion. The main one is between religion and the fear of death. Some empirical evidence indicates moderately religious individuals fear death more than either atheists or extremely religious individuals. The model also explains the positive relationship often found between religious activity (e.g. church attendance) and age. ...

Religious attendance is an important element of activity for older Europeans, especially in more traditional countries. The aim of the analysis is to explore whether it could be an element contributing to active ageing as well as to assess differences between the religious activity of older individuals with and without multimorbidity defined as an occurrence of two or more illnesses. The analys...

We draw on the organizational ecology tradition to frame the relationship between the religious environment of a community and local religious participation. Prior research linking religious environments to religious participation downplays a key organizational aspect of religion: the congregation. Following the organizational ecology usage of density, we argue that congregational density—the n...

According to systematic reviews, religious beliefs and practices are related to higher life satisfaction, happiness, and positive affect (Koenig and Larson, 2001). The present research extends previous findings by comparing satisfaction with life and character strengths of non-religious people, religious people, who practice their religion and people that have a religious affiliation but do not...

In Ethics in the Sanctuary, Margaret Battin argues that traditional evangelism, directed to promoting religious belief, practice, and affiliation, that is proselytizing, is morally questionable to the extent that it involves unwarranted paternalism in the interests of securing other-worldly benefits for potential converts. I argue that Christian evangelism is justified in order to make the this...