Religious entities play significant roles in the current refugee/ forced migration crisis. These roles include innovative and experience based ideas to address broken aspects of the humanitarian system, overall advocacy on behalf of refugees and migrants based on humanitarian and spiritual principles, direct action in refugee camps and communities, action in communities that refugees and migran...

Religious beliefs and institutions are central to Senegalese society and culture, and their outward and visible manifestations are omnipresent. A 2010 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study found that 98 percent of Senegalese surveyed said that religion is ‘very important’ in their daily lives.1 Contemporary roles of religious leaders and communities are intricately interwoven into society...

In a population-based study in the Netherlands, diphtheria antitoxin antibodies were measured with a toxin-binding inhibition assay in 9, 134 sera from the general population and religious communities refusing vaccination. The Dutch immunization program appears to induce long-term protection against diphtheria. However, a substantial number of adults born before the program was introduced had n...

Bangladesh hosts religious minorities that reflect the diverse faith traditions that have been influential in the historical region of Bengal over the millennia. Hindus, at 9.1 percent of the national population, are Bangladesh’s largest religious minority, though the Hindu population has declined significantly over the past 60 years since Partition (see figure 4). Buddhist communities, concent...

In spite of the generally large interest in demography of religious communities and the relation between population dynamics and various aspects of socio-economic life (for example economic development and social inequalities), there has until now not been any attempt to collect and estimate religious composition by age and sex as well as differences in fertility for all countries in the world....

This chapter seeks to explain our preliminary reflections on how different religious communities might use their texts and traditions to respond to and assess the ethics of oncofertility research and technologies. Specifically, this chapter will briefly explore the Catholic, Evangelical Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions and their anticipated or potential contributions to...

This special issue of Health Education & Behavior is devoted to broadly examining the interconnections among public health, health education, and faith-based communities. In addition to a focus on questions related to the practice of public health and health education within religious settings (e.g., program development, implementation, and evaluation), the articles in this issue examine a broa...

Research on how members of faith communities interact on online social networks and the factors that influence their computer-mediated communication are lacking. This study applies the concept of homophily to investigate the factors that encourage the development of relationship ties among members of faith communities on online social network sites such as Facebook. A survey was conducted with ...

This study integrates research in the civic community tradition and structuralist and individualist perspectives on poverty to assess the relationship between religious-based civic community structures and family poverty in the United States. Using multilevel analyses of 2006-2008 American Community Survey, 2000 Census of Population and Housing, and 2000 Religious Congregations and Membership S...

Background: Traditional and indigenous communities in India are of the religious belief that medicinal groves and plants are sacred in nature. Sacred groves (SGs) are patches of trees on forest land that are protected communally with religious zeal and connotations. These forest areas have been protected since ages by traditional societies and indigenous communities with their socio-cultural an...