Introduction: Rabbinic Sacramentalism? It is no news to announce that in rabbinic Judaism learning and study are holy, even sanctifying activities. But what is gained by asserting, as I do in the title of this essay, that aspects of classical rabbinic learning, particularly its insistence on the oral mastery of textual material, are usefully described as not merely 'sanctifying' but 'sacramenta...

It is no surprise to anyone in this audience that in the past century or so, worldwide Christianity has definitively moved South. In 1900, Christianity firmly rooted in Europe and North America, while by the mid-21 century it will find by far its greatest strongholds in Africa and Latin America. But while so much is familiar, it’s still tempting to position North and South in the familiar terms...

Without Christianity, the world would be a better place. So says a growing body of scholarship on the effects of religion on physical and mental health. The central claim is that Christian belief and practices are neutral or positively bad for your health, and that studies to the contrary are badly flawed, “weak,” or inconsistent with other studies and, hence, can be ignored. In one recent arti...

American Indians exhibit suicide-related behaviors at rates much higher than the general population. This study examines the relation of spirituality to the lifetime prevalence of attempted suicide in a probability sample of American Indians. Data were derived from a cross-sectional sample of 1456 American Indian tribal members (age range 15-57yr) who were living on or near their Northern Plain...

This is a review of the Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion. Drawing upon research on Germans converting to Islam and Turks converting to Christianity, converting is understood as complex fusion of individual choice and cultural/political conflict.