Previous research suggests that gays and lesbians not only look to the law as an important site of social recognition but also pursue strategies to legitimate their relationships outside of the law, such as having commitment ceremonies in religious institutions. While previous research suggests that homosexuality is a divisive issue within religious communities, we know little about how heteros...

BACKGROUND Tobacco control effort should be first started in people that are looked upon as role models for the general population. We aimed to determine the knowledge, attitude, and behavior of religious officials towards smoking and the new tobacco law. METHOD The study group was comprised of 492 Imams and 149 Quran course instructors working in Kahramanmaras city of Turkey, 641 religious o...

This essay explores religion’s need for law, comparing the story told in Mitra Sharafi’s Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia (2014)—about the virtual hijacking of British colonial law to serve the communal religious needs of Parsis in colonial India—to other contexts in which secular and religious legal systems have built symbiotic relationships, including in the United States and Thailand....

OBJECTIVE To explore the Bogor public's perspective on Muslim organisations' pronouncements against smoking and the effect of these pronouncements on compliance with a new smoke-free law in the context of a prosmoking social norm. DESIGN Semistructured focus group discussions were conducted, transcribed, coded using ATLAS.ti software, and analysed using thematic content analysis. Photo elicit...

the law of embryo donatioin declares that legitimacy of the process of in vitro fertilization is dependent upon observation of religious precepts, without specifying those precepts. as it is doctors of medicine who are in charge of that process, the lawmakers should reconsider that law and, while announcing a method which is religiously lawful, determine religious criteria of the process. as so...

This chapter traces how British and Dutch colonial officials gathered and organized knowledge on Islamic law in the British Straits Settlements (Penang, Malacca and Singapore) and the Netherlands Indies (present-day Indonesia) respectively. Despite clear differences between the legal systems and administrative structures of the two colonies, colonial authorities shared a considerable amount of ...