This article examines whether shared religious beliefs and religious social relationships (Durkheim) and belief in a personal, moral God (Stark) negatively affect attitudes toward the acceptability of white-collar crime. In addition, using a large cross-national sample and estimating multilevel models, we test whether effects are conditional on modernization and religious contexts characterized...

Time-consuming and costly religious rituals pose a puzzle for economists committed to rational choice theories of human behavior. We propose that religious rituals promote in-group trust and cooperation that help to overcome collective-action problems. To test this hypothesis we design field experiments to measure the in-group cooperative behavior of members of religious and secular Israeli kib...

Prior research has found that persons who favor more analytic modes of thought are less religious. We propose that individual differences in analytic thought are associated with reduced religious beliefs particularly when analytic thought is measured (hence, primed) first. The current study provides a direct replication of prior evidence that individual differences in analytic thinking are nega...

This study examined the role of religious and nonreligious cognitive-behavioral coping in a sample of 61 chronic pain patients from a midwestern pain clinic. Participants described their chronic pain and indicated their use of religious and nonreligious cognitive-behavioral coping strategies. Results supported a multidimensional conceptualization of religious coping that includes both positive ...

According to the Religious Openness Hypothesis, the religious and psychological openness of American Christians is obscured by a defensive ghettoization of thought associated with a Religious Fundamentalist Ideological Surround and can be discovered instead within a Biblical Foundationalist Ideological Surround. A test of this claim examined Religious Fundamentalism, Biblical Foundationalism, Q...

Economic growth has not led to a decline in religion despite past predictions that it would. Using a formal model of religious competition, I show how economic growth produces counteracting effects on religious activity in an open religious market, and that it has little effect in a religious market that is already secularized due to regulations that prohibit religious competition or in a highl...

BACKGROUND Religion and spirituality are a fundamental part of culture and influence how individuals experience and interpret infertility counselling. Thus far, little research has examined the influence of religiosity on the experience of infertility, and to our knowledge no study exists investigating the responses of religious infertile women to counselling. In this study we explored Muslim a...

In the 1960s in London, England, Cicely Saunders introduced a new way of treating the terminally ill, which she called “hospice care.” Saunders, a trained nurse, social worker, and medical doctor, held that humans should be able to die with dignity and at peace. This viewpoint originated from her medical experience as well as her religious commitment as a Christian. The religious basis of hospi...

BACKGROUND In the Netherlands, prenatal screening follows an opting in system and comprises two non-invasive tests: the combined test to screen for trisomy 21 at 12 weeks of gestation and the fetal anomaly scan to detect structural anomalies at 20 weeks. Midwives counsel about prenatal screening tests for congenital anomalies and they are increasingly having to counsel women from religious back...