A new cognitive approach to religion is bringing fresh insights to our understanding of how religious concepts are maintained, acquired and used to motivate and direct actions. This approach suggests that seemingly extraordinary thoughts and behaviours can be supported by quite ordinary cognition and may thus be termed 'natural'. Simultaneously, this research is expanding the domain of concepts...

In this paper, I examine the claim that Rawls’s overlapping consensus is too narrow to allow most mainstream religions’ participation in political discourse. I do so by asking whether religious exclusion is a consequence of belief or action, using conversion as a paradigm case. After concluding that this objection to Rawls is, in fact, defensible, and that the overlapping consensus excludes bot...

Although there is a growing interest in spirituality and religious issues in counseling, little has been written for the supervisor. This article addresses this need by demonstrating how J. Fowler’s (1981) model of faith development stages can inform supervisory work with spiritual and religious issues. Faith Development Theory is a growth-oriented approach to spiritual and religious developmen...

Studies of religious and other cultural groups tend to be particularistic or focus on one or more axes of variation. In this article we develop a more comprehensive approach to studying cultural diversity that emulates the study of biological diversity. We compare our cultural ecosystem approach with the axis approach, using the distinction between “tight” and “loose” cultures as an example. We...

Purpose This paper aims to analyze the relationship between religious differences (i.e. religious diversity and tolerance diversity), on the one hand, and dysfunctional intergroup conflicts, on the other. Design/methodology/approach A quantitative research design is used, through which the paper examines 47 public schools in India. Findings Religious diversity, that is, the distribution of hete...

objectives: the present research is aimed at surveying the role of (internal and external) religious orientation in the mental health and the extent of depression in elderly people residing in welfare centers and the society. methods: the study has been conducted through post-event and correlation method by using stochastic and cluster sampling in 230 cases of elderly people at senior citizens`...