This study sought to better understand the relationship between religion/spirituality and physical health and mental health in 122 patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain. The current study conceptualized religion/spirituality as a multidimensional factor, and measured it with a new measure of religion/spirituality for research on health outcomes (Brief Multidimensional Measure of Religion/S...

Since the revolutions of 1989, increased public interest in religion across the former Soviet bloc has helped to generate new topics of investigation in a variety of disciplines, from history to sociology to literary studies. Sociocultural anthropology has been no exception. At the 2003 Meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago, a number of anthropologists who have worked ...

In the present paper, we solve the problem of reducing to the simplest and convenient for our purposes, “canonical” form for an arbitrary pair of compatible nonlocal Poisson brackets of hydrodynamic type generated by metrics of constant Riemannian curvature (compatible Mokhov–Ferapontov brackets [1]) in order to get an effective construction of the integrable hierarchies related to all these co...

Religion is a collection of behavior that is only unified in our Western conception of it. It need not have a natural unity. There is no reason to assume, and good reason not to assume, that all religious behavior evolved together at the same time in response to a single shift in the environment. This article does not look at the religion as a unified entity and seek a definition of its essence...

The optimal sequenced route (OSR) query performs a critical role in finding the most economical route for a trip, for instance, location base services. OSR finds the minimum-length route, starting from an origin location and passing through a number of locations or points of interest (POIs), following the prespecified route sequence. An OSR query on road networks tends to expand an extremely la...

What is the ultimate nature of reality? This paper defends an answer in terms of informational realism (IR). It does so in three stages. First, it is shown that, within the debate about structural realism (SR), epistemic (ESR) and ontic (OSR) structural realism are reconcilable by using the methodology of the levels of abstractions. It follows that OSR is defensible from a structuralist-friendl...

This is the revised version of an invited keynote lecture delivered at the 1st Australian Computing and Philosophy Conference (CAP@AU; the Australian National University in Canberra, 31 October – 2 November, 2003). The paper is divided into two parts. The first part defends an informational approach to structural realism. It does so in three steps. First, it is shown that, within the debate abo...

Defining religion has never been simple; it is not a one-dimensional, monolithic condition but rather a complex enterprise with multi-dimensional consequences (Saroglou, 2013). Clifford Geertz (1973) characterized religion as a cultural form which “denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means ...

According to systematic reviews, religious beliefs and practices are related to higher life satisfaction, happiness, and positive affect (Koenig and Larson, 2001). The present research extends previous findings by comparing satisfaction with life and character strengths of non-religious people, religious people, who practice their religion and people that have a religious affiliation but do not...