Review Essay: On Common Ground: World Religions in America

Diana L. Eck and the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, On Common Ground: World Religiions in America     

Transformations: The World Religions Survey through an Adjunct Feminist Lens

This essay describes a transformation in my experience as an adjunct teaching underprepared students from one of shame toward a desire to assert the value of this work. Insights from my feminist theological training helped me to affirm the importance of encouraging transformative learning in teaching the academically marginalized and prompted my analysis of student writing in an introductory World Religions course, in order to determine whether or not the course was a site of transformative learning. I argue that despite many contextual limitations, the movement toward deepening self‐awareness and increasing openness to religious diversity seen in student writing demonstrates that transformative learning began in this course, and that is valuable for students' lives whether or not they are academically successful.     

Religion and Religions in Prisons: Observations from the United States and Europe

Despite manifest differences and internal variety, this article attempts to integrate the histories and present landscapes of religious practice in prison in the United States and in Western Europe. We identify, among incarcerated people in the United States, Italy, and Germany, discernible drifts toward religious pluralization, privatization, and individualization. Over the past half‐century, the administration of religion in prison has been loosened to allow for a wider variety of religious beliefs and practices. Meanwhile, as subsidized by outside volunteers, religion, especially of a socially “useful,” capitalism‐friendly sort, remains a cost‐effective means for prison administrators to efficiently subcontract their mandate to rehabilitate. Due to the decentralization and diversification of religion in contemporary prisons on both sides of the northern Atlantic, this article concludes by encouraging would‐be ethnographers of the prison interested in religion to venture beyond the expressly delineated religious space and into what we call “religious gray zones.”     

Multiple Modernities: The Role of World Religions in an Emerging Paradigm

This article contributes to the emerging multiple modernities thesis and its treatment of world religions. Using a cross-continent comparison of evangelical Pentecostalism, it argues that religion can have cross-cutting implications for modernity’s extension in the Global South. The social patterns and networks of national evangelical Pentecostal communities in different contexts vary, allowing them to help modernizing societies pursue unique goals and identities. However, Pentecostalism also introduces remarkably similar sets of formal organizations to its host societies, which are maintained by isomorphic pressures operating in transnational organizational fields. Religion thus promotes heterogeneity and homogeneity in modernizing contexts. These findings further nuance the multiple modernities thesis and show the potential utility of the thesis for the sociology of religion.     

Anchoring Religion in the World: A Southern African History of Comparative Religion

This essay focuses upon a single object, a shipwrecked anchor that was washed ashore on the eastern Cape coast of southern Africa. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, European travellers, missionaries, and magistrates cited this anchor as evidence of religion among indigenous people in the region. By the end of the century, however, this same anchor was being used by metropolitan theorists as a classic piece of evidence for the origin of religion. By recounting the strange story of this anchor, I hope to recover a history (or prehistory) of the study of religion in three phases—frontier, imperial and apartheid—that have defined the practice of comparative religion from a southern African perspective.     

Religion in Sexual Health: A Staff Perspective

This paper reports data on the complexities of delivering religious/spiritual care in sexual health from a staff perspective. A learning needs analysis, in survey format, was conducted with the nursing staff of a leading London, sexual health clinic. Recruitment took place in May 2011 over a period of 2 weeks. The sample consisted of 25 members of staff which included service support workers and registered nurses. The 25 question survey was conducted and reviewed using Survey Monkey?. The survey was divided into three sections, being population demographics, clinical experience and understanding and education. This article will explore the second section of being clinical experience and understanding. This section used six open-ended questions to investigate participant’s experience of common clinical episodes where religion was an influential part of the patient experience and decision-making. A range of contemporary sexual health and religious issues were extrapolated from the survey findings ranging from homosexuality to termination of pregnancy. Four main areas of complexity identified from participants responses were sexual dysfunction, treatment issues, sexual health knowledge and high-risk behaviour. Findings from the study highlight the diversity of influence of religion has on the sexual health of patients.     

Human Rights and Religion: A Sociological Perspective

This essay aims to review mainstream literature and research perspectives on the sociology of human rights with the further focus on relationship between human rights and religion. We consider the challenges of late engagement of sociology with human rights and current narratives of the relationship of human rights and religion that encompass normativity as the central category of historically oriented sociology. We discuss the contribution of two empirical research mainstreams on human rights and religion and focus on a new field of study—sociology of religious freedom. A detailed new agenda for sociological research on human rights and religion is explored in the final part of our assessment.     

Religion and Self: Notions from a Cultural Psychological Perspective

After a brief introduction of a cultural psychological perspective, this paper turns to the concept of self. The paper proposes to conceive of that reality to which the concepts of self refer as a narrative, employing especially autobiographies and other ego-documents in empirical exploration. After discussing some psychological theories about “self,” the paper points out that they may well be applied in research on personal religiosity.     

Teaching Religion Around the World: A Modest First Glimpse

This essay introduces a collection of short essays solicited from authors around the globe who teach religion courses at the college level (not for professional religious training). The central question uniting this collection is whether religious studies is a unified and global pedagogical field, and this introduction teases out salient continuities and discontinuities driven by broad cultural and political contexts. These essays are published together with this introduction in Teaching Theology and Religion 18:3 (July 2015). The authors were asked to provide a brief overview of the curriculum, student learning goals, and pedagogical techniques employed in their courses.     

Social Robotics,Education, and Religion in the Islamic World: An Iranian Perspective

Science and Engineering Ethics - The social impact of robotics applied to domains such as education, religion, nursing, and therapy across the world depends on the level of technology as well as...     

应对研究中的生态学思想述评

应对是心理学界研究的热点,对应对相关研究中的生态学思想进行挖掘、梳理、总结并进一步推广是非常有意义的,能够使应对的研究更加深入,更具真实性。对国内外应激—应对模型、应对与发展、应对与生态学、应对与环境方面的研究探讨进行总结,挖掘其中的生态学思想,为日后应对的理论和实证研究奠定基础,并基于此提出了应对的生态瞬时评估（EMA）研究的设想。