Inquiring into the causes behind the spread of secularism in the modern world, this paper proposes that the concept has proliferated owing to its peculiar property as culture: It is simultaneously a piece of culture and also a reflection upon culture. In its latter capacity, it imagines a world in which alternative religious belief systems divide people. It spreads as a piece of culture because...

This study describes attitudes and social and environmental factors that affect African American parents' intent to vaccinate their daughters against human papillomavirus (HPV). Thirty African American parents of daughters aged nine to 17 years and no history of HPV infection completed semi-structured interviews. Interviews addressed factors that influenced intent to vaccinate, perception of co...

Use of elemental mercury in certain cultural and religious practices can cause high exposures to mercury vapor. Uses include sprinkling mercury on the floor of a home or car, burning it in a candle, and mixing it with perfume. Some uses can produce indoor air mercury concentrations one or two orders of magnitude above occupational exposure limits. Exposures resulting from other uses, such as in...

Objective: The present study aimed at comparing the effects of Religious Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (RCBT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and sertraline on depression, anxiety, biomarker levels, and quality of life in patients after coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. Method: This was a randomized controlled trial with parallel groups. A total of 160 patients after CABG surgery...

Background: The relationship between religious involvement and health has been subject to an increasing interest. However, studies investigating religious involvement are scarce outside United States and Europe. Objectives: This study describes religious involvement in the Brazilian population and its relationship with sociodemographic variables. Methods: In a Brazilian nationally probabilistic...

UNLABELLED Introduction : Work over preparation of DSM-5 has been a stimulus for research and reflection over the impact of religious/spiritual factors on phenomenology, differential diagnosis, course, outcome and prognosis of mental disorders. AIM The aim of this paper is to present the attitude of DSM towards religion and spirituality in the clinical context. Even though DSM is not in use i...

National identity is symbolically complex configuration, with shifts of emphasis and reprioritisations of content negotiated in contexts of power. This paper shows how they occur in one post conflict situation – Northern Ireland – among some of the most extreme of national actors – evangelical Protestants. In-depth interviews reveal quite radical shifts in the content of their British identity ...

We annotate a small corpus of religious Arabic with morphological segmentation boundaries and fine-grained segment-based part of speech tags. Experiments on both segmentation and POS tagging show that the religious corpus-trained segmenter and POS tagger outperform the Arabic Treebak-trained ones although the latter is 21 times as big , which shows the need for building religious Arabic linguis...

Obtaining genuine informed consent from research participants in Background: developing countries can be difficult, partly due to poor knowledge about research process and research ethics. The situation is complicated when conducting genomic research on a disease considered familial and a reason for stigmatisation. We used a Rapid Ethical Appraisal tool to assess local factors that were Methods...