Increasing attention has been paid to how therapists might respond respectfully and usefully to clients’ religious and spiritual beliefs and commitments. Although recommendations overlap with principles of good clinical practice, some specific themes have emerged in the literature. Three of these are briefly examined in this article: the assessment process; responding to problematic religious a...

BACKGROUND Female genital mutilation (FGM) or female circumcision is the removal of variable amounts of tissue from the female external genitalia. It is practised all over the world on very young girls. This study was conducted in Sudan where FGM is a criminal offence and not a religious dictate. We assessed the knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions of this practice among Khartoum university st...

The Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS) is a measure of the centrality, importance or salience of religious meanings in personality that has been applied yet in more than 100 studies in sociology of religion, psychology of religion and religious studies in 25 countries with in total more than 100,000 participants. It measures the general intensities of five theoretical defined core dimensions...

Sacrifice of animals at Eid-ul-Azha is a religious obligation which is performed with great religious fervour throughout the Islamic world each year. Some of the scholars argue that instead of sacrificing the animals, equal intended value in cash, among the poor may be distributed. This paper attempted to analyze this argument and found that distribution of alms in lieu of sacrifice has negligi...

Native peoples account for a disproportionate number of inmates in the current American prison population. Due to differences in the character of practice between Native and Judeo-Christian religions, it has been suggested that Native inmates face challenges that other prisoners do not because their religious needs are poorly understood. In the course of this paper I will discuss the disparitie...

The physician-patient relationship, which is the cornerstone of medical practice, is based upon a transaction between a sufferer and a healer. The healer is not only confronted with the patient's immediate medical needs but also with psycho-social problems which the illness causes, or is caused by. The physician therefore fulfills many functions: those of a technologist, philosopher, priest, so...

Although moral reasoning is able to account for some of the variability in moral behavior, much remains unexplained. Recently, a number of components of personality have been proposed as bridging the gap between moral reasoning and moral behavior. The present study investigates the role that identity integration (the extent to which one’s moral values have become integrated into identity) and r...

The objective of the present study is to investigate the use of religious/spiritual coping mechanisms in patients with chronic kidney disease undergoing hemodialysis, by means of interviews using a sociodemographic questionnaire and the religious/spiritual coping scale. Data analysis was performed using descriptive statistics and multiple linear regression. A total of 123 individuals were inter...

Numerous authors have suggested that religious belief has a positive association, possibly causal, with prosocial behavior. This article critiques evidence regarding this "religious prosociality" hypothesis from several areas of the literature. The extant literature on religious prosociality is reviewed including domains of charity, volunteering, morality, personality, and well-being. The exper...