The role of religious conversion in marriages and family functioning has been little explored. The current study examined family functioning and parenting stress among returnees to Orthodox Judaism with adolescent children. Possible explanatory factors for difficulties, such as attachment insecurity, religious discord in families, and poor community integration, were also explored. Randomly sel...

Conversion therapies, also know as reparative therapies, emphasize homosexual orientations as psychopathology in gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) clients and claim these individuals can reverse their sexual orientation through psychiatric counseling and treatment. Although professional medical and nursing organizations have branded psychiatric interventions designed to change an i...

BACKGROUND Religion is an important underlying determinant of HIV spread in sub-Saharan Africa. However, little is known about how religion influences changes in HIV prevalence and associated sexual behaviours over time. OBJECTIVES To compare changes in HIV prevalence between major religious groups in eastern Zimbabwe during a period of substantial HIV risk reduction (1998-2005) and to invest...

Although the spiritual vibration of conversion can be felt (by the curious outsider) through what conversion performers say in their testimonial discourse, what transforms the convert 'on stage' into a 'new being' and what is 'the real' (le réel) in conversion performance remain unclear. An important question in this connection is, What is 'real' in a conversion representation, both with respec...

OBJECTIVE Near-death experiences have been defined as profound psychological events that may occur to a person while close to death or in a situation of extreme physical or emotional distress. These experiences seem to have an important effect on the patients' mental health and may occur in several situations despite their cultural and religious beliefs. CASE DESCRIPTION The present case repo...

10 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, while best known for his representations of the landscapes and rustic inhabitants of his native Lowlands, did not restrict himself to these topics—in fact, most of his paintings address religious subjects, even when placing them in carefully constructed landscapes. When Bruegel represented biblical events, such as the Tower of Babel or the Conversion of Saint Paul, ...

Many societies became Muslim gradually, without conquest by Muslim rulers. Explanations of this process typically focus on Muslim traders, proselytizing ‘holy men’, and the conversion of ruling elites, as the limited sources suggest. Yet it cannot be assumed that Islamization always made sense for elites as a power-enhancing stratagem, or that rulers or holy men were willing or able to shape th...

Cognitive theories of religious experience, while helpful in explaining some aspects of spirit possession, do not provide a means of accounting for the experience of mediums whose ordinary selves are ‘absent’ during possession rituals. Using the late nineteenthcentury medium, Mrs Piper, as a case study, I argue that hypnosis provides a means of inducing involuntary experiences similar to those ...

Among Freud's papers, we find instances in which Freud describes the "psychopathology of everyday life" as he found it in himself and in others. "A Religious Experience" (Freud, 1928) contains examples of both kinds. In addition, this paper contains a slip of which Freud appears to have been unaware. Freud's paper interprets a religious conversion described in a letter written to him in English...