The long-term effects of child sexual abuse include numerous psychological, social, and behavioral difficulties in women survivors, ranging from poor self-esteem and depression to sexual disorders and posttraumatic stress disorder. The role that religious beliefs may play in the difficulties these women suffer has been largely unexplored. This qualitative study explored women's experience of he...

At the start of the twenty-first century, Catholicism is still the prevailing belief system of most Italians, but a recent project on Italian religion and spirituality, 5 carried out in 2006, has found that Italians are now more interested in spirituality, that they might describe themselves as ‘spiritual, but not religious’, and that they privilege the ‘god within’ rather than the transcendent...

The public profile of the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States results not simply from their own interventions in political life, but from the broad array of actions and actors within “public Catholicism” broadly conceived. This article assesses the contemporary profile of the American bishops from this broad angle, particularly in light of new dynamics under the papacy of Francis I. It ...

ESPITE THE TRADITIONAL teaching of the Christian Church that homosexual behaviour is always sinful, there are grounds for believing that Anglo-Catholic religion within the Church of England has offered emotional and aesthetic satisfactions that have been particularly attractive to members of a stigmatised sexual minority. This apparent connection between Anglo-Catholicism and the male homosexua...