A Common Faith is arguably one of John Dewey’s least eff ective books. In it, he tries to persuade readers that the best of two epistemologically diff erent worlds can be reconciled in a common faith—one that employs the methods of science with a generously religious attitude. Possibly most of us today believe this cannot be done; that is, the two worlds will remain unreconciled. But perhaps, w...

This article tells the story of the sacred place named Mata Loko (“River’s Source”) in Karendi on the western end of the island of Sumba. This ethnographic case of an eastern Indonesian society where the traditional religion of Marapu persists sheds light on questions of how local belief systems are part of environmental adaptations. The use of sacred resources is restricted by the belief that ...

The traditional health care system in Ghana is a holistic one that integrates our social ethics, religious morals and cultural values. We believe that the health of an individual has a link with the metaphysical and supernatural world; with the Creator, divinities and ancestral spirits. With this belief, disease has a spiritual dimension. In spite of this the scientific theory of disease is als...

Debates about the metaphysical compatibility between miracles and natural laws often appear to prejudge the issue by either adopting or rejecting a strong physicalist thesis (the idea that the physical is all that exists). The operative component of physicalism is a causal closure principle: that every caused event is a physically caused event. If physicalism and this strong causal closure prin...

This paper examines three ancient traits of religion whose origins likely date back to the Upper Paleolithic: ancestor worship, shamanism, and the belief in natural and animal spirits. Evidence for the emergence of these traits coincides with evidence for a dramatic advance in human social cooperation. It is argued that these traits played a role in the evolution of human cooperation through th...

So-called “natural” disasters are often characterized by major human rights abuses, yet responsibility and accountability for such violations have attracted relatively limited attention in research practice. Instead, these events survivors’ suffering dismissed as “acts of God” or tragic misfortunes. Through analysis an under-examined disaster—the 2017 mudslide Freetown, Sierra Leone—this articl...

Though religion has been shown to have generally positive effects on normative 'prosocial' behavior, recent laboratory research suggests that these effects may be driven primarily by supernatural punishment. Supernatural benevolence, on the other hand, may actually be associated with less prosocial behavior. Here, we investigate these effects at the societal level, showing that the proportion o...

In this transcultural study of schizophrenic delusions among patients in Seoul, Shanghai and Taipei, we discovered that both the frequency and content of delusions differed among the three groups; and that these differences could perhaps be explained by varying sociocultural and political situations. Delusional themes that are sensitive to sociocultural or political situations include guilt, lo...