Negotiating Religious Differences: The Strategies of Interfaith Chaplains in Healthcare

Chaplains in healthcare increasingly work in interfaith roles with patients and families from a range of religious and spiritual backgrounds. Some move with ease between their own religious backgrounds and those of the individuals with whom they work. Others encounter tensions as their status as a person of faith comes into conflict with their status as an interfaith chaplain. We explore the two main strategies—neutralizing and code‐switching—chaplains at one large academic medical center use when working with patients and families whose religious and spiritual backgrounds are different from their own. Through training in clinical pastoral education and experiences on the job, chaplains learn to neutralize (use a broad language of spirituality that emphasizes commonalities rather than differences) and to code‐switch (use the languages, rituals, and practices of the people with whom they work). To the extent that the strategies evident here are present among chaplains in a broader range of institutional settings, they suggest a kind of spiritual secularism or broad approach to meaning makings that may be facilitated by interfaith chaplains in a range of settings.     

宗教理解和宗教多元论问题

我们几乎都能肯定,诸宗教之问或多或少都有"排他"倾向,认为真理掌握在自己的手里,其他宗教信仰或多或少是错误的.一般宗教都在宣传自己的优越性,为自己的存在合理性寻找依据,即使是那些自认为是"非宗教的宗教"也是如此.     

The Association Between Strength of Religious Faith and Psychological Functioning

Recently researchers have begun examining the benefit of religious faith on mental and physical health outcomes. This study examined the relationship between religious faith and psychological functioning in 342 university students in diverse educational and geographic settings including a private West Coast Catholic college (sample 1), a Southern public state university (sample 2), and a Southern private Baptist college (sample 3). Participants completed several self-report measures. Strength of religious faith was significantly associated with optimism and experiencing meaning in life among sample 1. Results from sample 2 suggest that strength of religious faith was significantly associated with coping with stress, optimism, experiencing meaning in life, viewing life as a positive challenge, and low anxiety. Strength of religious faith was significantly associated with viewing life as a positive challenge and self-acceptance among sample 3. Although modest correlations surfaced, results suggest that strength of religious faith is associated with several important positive mental health benefits among college students.     

Philosophical Implications of Religious Pluralism

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research - Living in multi-religious societies in almost all parts of the world, religious diversity is a fact of life for all of us in the contemporary...     

Religious Experience in a Cross-Cultural and Interfaith Context: Limitations and Possibilities

Religious experience is a multifaceted aspect of an individual’s experience involving conscious and unconscious components. Individuals, for example, maintain varied ideas of God at different levels of awareness and consciousness, all of which contribute to their broader experience of God. This paper focuses primarily on complex theistic experiences of God, their relationship to psychological and spiritual health, and how these experiences can be changed through psychological intervention. Consideration is also given to ethical issues and other implications of changing one’s religious experience.     

从佛教立场迈向宗教多元主义与宗教对话

本文主要从佛教思想内部寻找宗教多元主义与宗教对话的智慧,以便为当前文明对话提供思想资源。首先,佛教将佛教以外的一切宗教称为"外道",最后以真理观打破自他宗教的界限,充分表现了宗教多元主义的倾向;其次,二谛的思想模式具有终极实在与多元宗教的意义,而且二谛的相即、不二的关系,体现了宗教多元主义的真理观;最后,瑜伽行派的种姓各别与种子熏习思想,表达了宗教对话的必要性与可能性。     

The Association Between Strength of Religious Faith and Coping with Daily Stress

Recent research has examined the positive relationship between religious faith and both physical and mental health. The current study investigated the association between strength of religious faith and the ability to cope with daily stress over a 7-day period. The participants consisted of 68 students and 64 faculty or staff from a Catholic, liberal arts university. Measures included the Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith Questionnaire, the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, the Symptom Check List-90-Revised, the Weinberger Low Self Esteem Scale, and a 10-point daily stress, coping, and strength of faith scale. Results suggest that religious faith was not associated with coping with daily stress.     

Encounters at the Religious Edge: Variation in Religious Expression Across Interfaith Advocacy and Social Movement Settings

In a time of increasing religious diversity, interfaith political coalitions have become important settings for interreligious interaction, but little research has explored the types of religious expression that are generated therein. Prevailing theories in the sociology of religion indicate that interaction with religious others results in dilution of traditional religious commitments or production of stronger boundaries. But emerging perspectives in cultural sociology shift attention from individual religious commitments to the ways in which settings shape different styles of religious expression. Insights about edge spaces drawn from urban theory suggest that religiously diverse settings can be generative of new types of religious practices. We apply these insights to the study of interfaith activism by drawing on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with religious advocacy professionals and activists working in interfaith coalitions. Conceptualizing the sites of these interfaith encounters as edge spaces, we analyze variation in the types of religious expression that occur in interfaith settings. We find that both aggregative and integrative practices are produced, but these vary depending on the goals and structure of the setting, as well as participants’ accountability to outside religious gatekeepers.     

Internal Realism,Religious Pluralism and Ontology

Internalist pluralism is an attractive and elegant theory. However, there are two apparently powerful objections to this approach that prevent its widespread adoption. According to the first objection, the resulting analysis of religious belief systems is intrinsically atheistic; while according to the second objection, the analysis is unsatisfactory because it allows religious objects simply to be defined into existence. In this article, I demonstrate that an adherent of internalist pluralism can deflect both of these objections, and in the course of so arguing, I deploy a distinction between “conceptual-scheme targetability” and “successful conceptual-scheme targeting”.

The Presuppositions of Religious Pluralism and the Need for Natural Theology

In ‘The Presuppositions of Religious Pluralism and the Need for Natural Theology’ I argue that there are four important presuppositions behind John Hick’s form of religious pluralism that successfully support it against what I call fideistic exclusivism. These are i) the ought/can principle, ii) the universality of religious experience, iii) the universality of redemptive change, and iv) a view of how God (the Eternal) would do things. I then argue that if these are more fully developed they support a different kind of exclusivism, what I call rational exclusivism, and become defeaters for pluralism. In order to explain rational exclusivism and its dependence on these presuppositions I consider philosophers J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and Alvin Plantinga, who offer arguments for their forms of exclusivism but I maintain that they continue to rely on fideism at important points. I then give an example of how knowledge of the Eternal can be achieved.

Anecdotal Pluralism,Total Evidence and Religious Diversity

Philosophia - My main claim is that, contrary to the assumptions of mainstream literature, epistemic religious diversity is not a matter of an abstract comparison among the belief systems of...     

Pluralism and Voluntarism in the English Religious Economy

This article reappraises what has been understood, according to secularisation theory, as the necessarily counter-productive impact of Christian pluralism and voluntarism. The complex interface between institutional religion, voluntarists, and secularisation is explored. A similar pattern of decline among institutional forms of religion in the US and England is identified and examined. This is accompanied by an unexpected trend in late twentieth-century English church attendance that indicates market share moving decisively towards the voluntarists. This shift, paradoxically, will increase secularisation in the short term, whether it is indicative of the voluntarists showing signs of late onset decline or late onset prominence. Under the post 1960s secular canopy, a free market ethos may be emerging in European Protestantism.     

Crossing Streams in the Dark: Religious Pluralism and Theological Education

Examining a presentation made to the Pacific Coast Theological Society in 1939, this essay identifies some of the enduring issues for theological and religious education created by the reality of religious pluralism. Addressing religious pluralism is a dialectic process moving between the two poles of disorienting otherness and analogies based on the already familiar. Both moments are necessary, and neither is final. Education in a religiously plural world requires enabling students to live in a state of uncertainty.