Religion,Altruism, and Helping Strangers: A Multilevel Analysis of 126 Countries

This article tests how religion relates to helping strangers, an important but rarely studied measure of social solidarity and informal social capital. It uses the Gallup World Poll, a survey with nationally representative samples of 179,961 respondents from 126 countries. It finds that religious people, members of minority religions, and people in religiously diverse countries were more likely to help a stranger. Individuals living in devout countries were more likely to help strangers even if they themselves were not religious. The results suggest that religion plays a particularly important role in promoting the prosocial norms and values that motivate helping strangers.     

Mikael Stenmark,Rationality in Science,Religion and Everyday Life: A Critical Evaluation of Four Models of Rationality.

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Habermas,Religion, and Public Life

Abstract

Although many scholars view Jürgen Habermas as the most important philosopher and social theorist since Weber, his account of religion has been relatively neglected. This may be a reflection of the fact that he appears to offer quite distinct views of religion, but it may also reflect the strong secularist assumptions of his early work. In this paper, Habermas’s early and later views of religion are outlined and the change in his understanding of religion is mapped—from being one of the sources of modernity’s inner problems to being a principal source of the passions and motivations underpinning cultural life today. I argue that the relative neglect of Habermas’s work on religion is unfortunate, as it offers a creative and important attempt to move beyond the secular assumptions that have characterised much modern study of religion, providing it with a central role in the mediation of the costs and benefits of modernity.     

Self-Recording of Everyday Life Events: Origins, Types, and Uses

ABSTRACT In this article we review the history of the scientific use of self-recording and conclude that there are three basic methods: ( a ) interval-contingent, in which respondents report on their experiences at regular intervals, ( b ) signal-contingent, in which respondents report when signaled, and ( c ) event-contingent, in which respondents report whenever a defined event occurs. We then discuss the relative merits of these techniques for answering different questions. Finally, we note that self-recording of small events is a departure from the science of psychology as typically practiced, requiring an acceptance of reality as defined by respondents.     

Sweet Necessities: Food, Sex, and Saint Augustine

Central to Augustine's understanding of rightly ordered sexuality is his belief that the pleasure of the act should not be separated from its good (procreation). It is useful to observe that he reasons in a similar way about eating: that the pleasure of eating should not be separated from its good (nourishment). Inadequacies in his understanding of the purpose of food and eating may be instructive when we think about inadequacies in his understanding of sex. If there is more to food than he imagines, the same may be true of sex. Correcting for such inadequacies may also help correct for the (inadvertent) way in which his understanding of the purpose of sex may seem to legitimize technologies of assisted reproduction.     

Evaluating Explanations in Law, Science, and Everyday Life

ABSTRACT— This article reviews a theory of explanatory coherence that provides a psychologically plausible account of how people evaluate competing explanations. The theory is implemented in a computational model that uses simple artificial neural networks to simulate many important cases of scientific and legal reasoning. Current research directions include extensions to emotional thinking and implementation in more biologically realistic neural networks.