Escaping Religion: As Content,Yes; As Process,No

The author states that, although psychology may dismiss religious contents as better suited to other areas of scholarship, it cannot go on dismissing the predicational process that brings religious manifestations about in all known human societies. He suggests that religion is the highest manifestation of the teleological capacity that all humans possess and which motivates human behavior.     

Religion,Philosophy and Family Resemblances

Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblances has been adopted by some writers either to explain the use of the word ‘religion’ or to advocate a use in the context of a definition. The purpose of this definition is supposedly to avoid an essentialist definition of religion such as ‘belief in God or gods’ which is seen as too parochially tied to Judaeo-Christian theistic origins of the word, while at the same time guaranteeing a distinctive role for religion as a universally applicable analytical concept. However, if an essentialist definition is not smuggled in for the purpose of maintaining a distinction between the ‘religion’ family and other neighbouring families such as ideologies, worldviews, values or symbolic systems, then the family becomes so indefinite that the word ceases to pick out any distinctive aspect of human culture. And this definitional dilemma in fact reflects the actual use of the word ‘religion’ by the scholarly community. Analysis of ‘religion’ texts shows that the word is used in such a large range of contexts that it is devoid of analytical value. Consequently, there is an obligation on the community of scholars to reconceptualize the wide and valuable range of work which is being carried out in ‘religion’ departments.     

Atheists and Agnostics Negotiate Religion and Family

Through in‐depth interviews with scientists at elite academic institutions—those particularly likely to have no firm belief in God—we provide insight into the motives scientists who are not religious have for joining a religious group and the struggle faced by these individuals in reconciling personal beliefs with what they consider the best interests of their families. Narratives stress the use of resources from identities as scientists to provide their children with religious choices consistent with science and in negotiating spousal influence and a desire for community. Findings expand the religious socialization and identities literatures by widening the range of understanding of the strategies parents utilize to interface with religious communities as well as lead to more nuanced public understanding of how atheist and agnostic scientists relate to religious communities.     

Family Admission Decisions As a Therapeutic Tool

The decision admit a disturbed adolescent to a mental hospital is all too often made by a hard-pressed duty psychiatrist, late in the day, but early in his training. The effects of this decision may well reverberate down the generations. At the Unit for younger adolescents at Hill End Hospital, St. Albans, Hertfordshire, England ( 5 ), the family, not the psychiatrist, makes the decision. This approach is based on the observation that when families eject their youngsters, parental authority is often disintegrating. Referral for admission provides a golden opportunity, not only for reversing the ejection process, but also for forging, on the anvil of a profoundly important decision, a more viable family authority structure. Therapeutic leverage is made available at the very heart of the family problem.     

As If Religion Matters: Teaching the Introductory Course as if it Does

This essay chronicles the academic odyssey of a young professor who sets out to revise the department's Introduction to Religion course only to realize that she must first clarify her vocational commitments before she can create a teachable course. She is convinced through working with many students who express disdain or even hostility toward the subject matter that she wants to model a relationship to the subject matter that says religion matters, but is uncertain how to do this. After an autobiographical foray into her academic upbringing in active learning, the author articulates four values to model in her teaching: personal relevance, academic responsibility, ethics, and community. The author then engages current scholarship in active learning, and narrates the process of translating those four values into concrete course goals and particular assignments. The essay concludes with an assessment of teaching the revised course.     

The Immersion Experience: Lessons from Study Abroad in Religion

This paper discusses strategies I employed during seven years of teaching within a study abroad program focusing on religion. This year‐long program traveled to four Asian countries and included immersion experiences in monasteries, ashrams, and other religious institutions. I identify four principles and discuss accompanying exercises that guided my teaching: (1) Accept and observe anxiety. Inability to understand is a sign that direct and deep contact is taking place. (2) Educate about education. Help students to see the aims, assumptions, and context of the teaching strategies religious practitioners employ. (3) Make it practical. Devise exercises that students can do and do well and that do not demand synthetic, systematic comprehension even as a goal. (4) Stop making sense. Build pauses and breaks into the train of reflection on the meaning of experience. These spaces give room for the shifts in the ways of learning that study abroad demands. This essay is published alongside of six other essays, including a response from John Barbour, comprising a special section of the journal (see Teaching Theology and Religion 18:1, January 2015).     

Taking As: Experience & Judgment in the Life of Agents

Although appearances may deceive them, agents are capable of achieving their ends; this success is frequently explained by the fact that the agents may, for example, see a stick in water as bent without believing that it is actually bent. Although the notion of ‘seeing as’ is supposed to both bridge the gap between experience and action and explain our reaction to illusions, such accounts break down because of their exclusive focus on visual episodes and their tendency to interpret the metaphysics of agency in a psychologistic fashion. This paper shows that ‘seeing as’ needs to be understood as a species of the genus ‘taking as.’ The genus admits a wider array of expression, in terms of the kinds of attitudes, actions, and epistemological statuses involved. Such an analysis allows us to avoid the problems of ‘seeing as’ accounts and deepens our understanding of the relationship between practical and theoretical reason.     

A Family Experience of Personal Genomics

This article presents a personal journey of a close-knit family from Málaga, Spain who engaged with direct-to-consumer (DTC) genomic testing. Whilst the testing was initiated by one member of the family who works as a genome bioinformatician, none of the remaining family had any prior experience with DTC genetic testing. A thoughtful account, written in the first person, is offered on the experience of genome testing across the various members of the family together with a reflection on how it felt to be a custodian of the ‘family genome’. The way the family processed their genome information is explored and the difficulties and challenges that resulted are discussed. Whilst there is a wealth of literature that describes how families communicate information surrounding single genes, there is very little which explores the experience of communication about whole, shared genomes. The experiences described in this paper provide an insight into this new territory.     

Religion and Attitudes Toward Family Planning Issues Among US Adults

Although religion is an important influence on a variety of social attitudes, the relationship between religion and views on family planning remains underexplored, especially in terms of attitudes relating to public policy. Using data from a nationally-representative survey (N = 1,500) fielded in 1998, we examine the influence of religious affiliation, subcultural identification, and attendance on three aspects of attitudes toward contraception in the public sphere. Specifically, we explore opinions regarding the public consequences of contraception and the responsibility for making contraception available as part of health care services in the United States. More frequent religious attendance is linked to less-approving opinions about contraception and less support for its provision by the US government and health insurers. Catholic affiliation is not consistently associated with the examined opinions, and we find mixed results for conservative Protestants. Including religious subcultural identities yields additional information, with born-again Christians reporting less positive opinions about the consequences of contraceptive availability, while evangelical identity is linked to negative views on policy aimed at increasing access to family planning services. These findings contribute to knowledge about the relationship between religion and attitudes toward policy-relevant aspects of contraception, as well as the broader social influences of religious subcultural identification.     

重建儒教的危险、必要及其中行路线

将儒家视为西方意义上的宗教,并且试图去建立儒教团体,会对儒家的事业带来危险。然而,在今天的文化形势下,又的确需要重建原本意义上的儒教,也就是依照儒家或儒教的“人间生活化”和“亲子源头性”的特点,来建构儒教。所以,在使儒家复活的现实努力中,只走上行路线(进入政治主流)和下行路线(进入民间)是困难的或不够的,还需要考虑中行路线,即建立儒家特区,在文化多样的格局中让儒家的天然活力得以复苏。     

Religion and Family Relational Health: An Overview and Conceptual Model

This paper presents a review of research addressing religion and family relational health. Strengths of the extant data include the correlation of three dimensions of religious experience (religious practices, religious beliefs, and religious community) with certain aspects of mother–child, father–child, and marital relationships and specific connections between the three dimensions of religious experience and family relationships are identified. Key weaknesses in the research at present include a paucity of research examining the hows, whys, and processes involved behind identified religion–family correlations and a lack of data on non-nuclear families, families of color, interfaith families, and non-Christian religions including Judaism and Islam. Implications for clinical practice and recommendations for future research are offered. Loren Marks is an Assistant Professor of Family, Child, and Consumer Sciences in the School of Human Ecology at Louisiana State University. He and his research collaborator, David Dollahite of BYU, have conducted extensive qualitative research with over 125 Christian, Jewish, Mormon, and Muslim families to examine the interfaces between religion, individual development, and family relationships.     

Socioeconomic Status and Perceived Expectations As Measures of Family Influence

This is a study of changes in the educational plans of a longitudinal group of 255 males over grades 8, 9, 10, and 11. Subjected to testing and confirmed is the hypothesis that the student's perceived interaction with parents, regardless of socioeconomic status, is more directly associated with his educational plans than is socioeconomic status itself. The results also suggest that peers do not exceed parents in their influence upon adolescent plans when both sources of possible influence are measured by the same method.     

Gender, Religion, and the Experience of Suffering: A Case Study

This article explores how gender and religious belief come together in an elderly woman’s experience of suffering. It is based on qualitative research that explored experiences of suffering in a group of community-dwelling elders (80+) living in a North American city. We use the case study method to introduce themes that show suffering’s uniqueness to the individual whose narrative we report, as well as similarity to themes that emerged in other participants’ narratives. In this case, an elderly woman’s gender and religious identities merge in her stories of suffering, which include the memory of a childhood disability and an incident of clergy abuse that occurred 70 years previously. A key finding in this paper is that key themes in her story of suffering, which are disablement and clergy abuse, resonate to the general themes of suffering found in our study, which are (1) threats to personal identity; (2) loss of a valued item, quality, or relationship; and (3) a lack of control over self or the circumstances of life.