Contrary to some predictions, it appears religion is coming back. We are constantly being reminded that religion is becoming more important again in late modernity. Despite this, religion is still “banished to the sidelines in the contemporary field of theoretical struggle” (Beckford 2003: 12). Moreover, when religion is studied, it is often a concept of ‘religion’ so reified and generalised as...

OBJECTIVE This study compared the ways in which psychiatrists and nonpsychiatrists interpret the relationship between religion/spirituality and health and address religion/spirituality issues in the clinical encounter. METHOD The authors mailed a survey to a stratified random sample of 2,000 practicing U.S. physicians, with an oversampling of psychiatrists. The authors asked the physicians ab...

Shaw and his colleagues [Shaw, B., Han, J., Kim, E., Gustafson, D., Hawkins, R., Cleary, C., et al. (2007). Effects of prayer and religious expression within computer support groups on women with breast cancer. Psycho-oncology, 16(7), 676–687] examined religious expression in breast cancer (BC) online support groups (OSG). Using Pennebaker’s LIWC text analysis to assess religious expression, th...

Recent functional neuroimaging data, acquired in studies of religious experience, have been used to explain and justify religion and its origins. In this paper, we critique the move from describing brain activity associated with self-reported religious states, to explaining why there is religion at all. Toward that end, first we review recent neuroimaging findings on religious experience, and s...

This Special Issue of the online open access journal Religions is entitled “Critical Approaches to ‘Religion’ in Japan: Case Studies and Redescriptions” [...]

theoretical expectations. The assumption is that along with modernization and economic development, adherence to religious world views (seen to be a relic of the past) gradually dissipate, as they have in other advanced societies. But they haven’t in the United States. In fact, the importance of religious commitments and religious organizations to American society increased over the last severa...

Religion and spirituality exert a significant role in the lives of many individuals, including people with schizophrenia. However, the contribution of religion and spirituality to various domains (psychopathology, explanatory models, treatment seeking, treatment adherence, outcome, etc.) has not received much attention. In this article, we review the exiting data with regards to the relationshi...

After long neglect, the subject of religion has received growing attention in the economics profession over the past two decades. One of the reasons is that it has proven diffi cult to explain the levels of economic development of many nations around the world without reference to a national culture, and many of these cultures have been signifi cantly infl uenced by religion. Contrary to a wide...