论人类中心论的本质——关于生态伦理学论争的一个反思

生态伦理学中的人类中心论是一个价值论命题,它与人类沙文主义没有本质区别.人类中心论通常以维护人类利益特别是其长远整体利益自居,以此作为自己的本质,但"维护人类利益"并不是人类中心论的特质,这是它与非人类中心论的共通之处.两者的本质区别并不是由"对人类单方面利益的态度"所决定的,而是由它们对其所共同面对的问题"人与自然关系的本质"的解答所决定的.人类中心论认为人是唯一价值主体,其本质就在于它是一种绝对主体主义.     

Religion and the five factor model of personality: An exploratory investigation using a Canadian university sample

The purpose of the present study was to examine the relation of religion, defined in terms of religious affiliation, religious involvement and religious orientation, to the five factor model of personality as measured by the NEO Personality Inventory-Revised using a religiously heterogeneous sample of 1129 Canadian university students. Results indicate that NEO-PI-R Agreeableness and Conscientiousness domains are significantly related to and affected by religion as measured across all three operationalizations of the construct used, though some sex differences were observed. Contrary to expectation, Neuroticism was found to differ as a function of religious affiliation with persons, particularly females, reporting No Religion obtaining significantly higher scores than those persons reporting a formal religious institution for their affiliation. Findings involving Extraversion were also inconsistent with hypotheses; Extraversion did not significantly relate to any form of religion measured. Openness was found to be largely unassociated with religion except for a significant negative correlation with a measure of extrinsic religious orientation. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings in relation to existing literature and Eysenck's hypothesis that religiousness is a function of conditionability and tender-minded attitudes. Limitations of the study and suggestions for future research are also overviewed.     

Role of Religion and Spirituality in Stress Management Among Nurses

Religion and spirituality play a significant role as coping resources under stressful circumstances. Nursing professionals confront with a variety of stressors repeatedly and are found to employ religious/spiritual coping techniques in managing the negative impact of work stress. The present review explores different religious and spiritual coping strategies utilized by nurses of different socio-cultural and religious backgrounds and highlights the importance of treating religion and spirituality as two separate entities in studying their stress-buffering effect. The MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, PsycArticles databases and Google Scholar were searched from 2006 to 2017 with the key words nursing, stress, religious coping, religiosity and spirituality. Various notions of the divine/transcendent aspect of life have led to lack of consensus over a functional definition of religion as well as spirituality. This is found to be the core element of methodological inadequacy in studying individuals’ reliance on religion and spirituality during stress. Further, most of the existing measures do not adequately explore spirituality as a construct independent of religion. Measures should be more culture sensitive to discover culturally enriched religious practices and rituals adopted by individuals belonging to different socio-cultural milieu to overcome stress. The role of religion and spirituality in stress resilience, emotion regulation and burnout among nurses around the globe needs further empirical support. Multiple levels at which religious and spiritual coping may moderate/mediate the relationship between work stress and behavioral/emotional outcomes among human service personnel who face high emotional labor demands should be more comprehensively analyzed.     

SBNR Identity: The Role of Impersonal God Representations,Individualistic Spirituality,and Dissimilarity With Religious Groups

We conducted two studies investigating the extent to which self-identification as Spiritual but not Religious (SBNR) was associated with (H1) the development of idiosyncratic religious beliefs and exposure to religious diversity and/or (H2) negative attitudes toward organized religion and being hurt by members of a religious group. In Study 1, SBNRs scored higher than religious and nonreligious participants on belief in God as an impersonal cosmic force (but not as a personal being) and individualistic spirituality. Although SBNRs had positive attitudes toward religion, they were less positive than those identifying as religious. Exposure to religious diversity and hurt by religious groups were not significant predictors of SBNR. We replicated these results in Study 2 using a multi-item measure of God representations and also found that SBNRs’ attitudes toward religion were predicted by a perceived dissimilarity with religious groups over and above individualism, secular group participation, perceptions of Christianity as too structured, and liberalism.     

Near-death experiences and religion: A further investigation

The relationship between religion and near-death experiencers (NDEs) was examined by interviewing 40 near-death experiences who were given a series of instruments to measure religious orientation and religious change. No relationship was found between religious orientation prior to the NDE and the depth of the NDE. However, a significant correlation was found between the depth of the NDE and a subsequent increase both in the importance of religion and in religious activity. Various theoretical explanations of NDEs were examined to account for these findings.     

Religious Characteristics,Spirituality, and Depressive Symptoms Among 10th- to 12th-Graders Living in a Buddhist or Daoist Culture: A Short-Term Longitudinal Study

This study examines changes in and the relationship among religiosity, spiritual well-being, and depressive symptoms in primarily Buddhist or Daoist Taiwanese adolescents. A total of 2,239 16- to 18-year-old adolescents from 4 high schools were randomly selected and completed a questionnaire at baseline and at 6-month follow-up. Half of the Taiwanese adolescents reported being religious (50%), with Buddhism or Daoism predominating in terms of religious affiliation. Around 80% of adolescents believed in a God, but less than 40% believed that religion is important. Mixed models found no significant relationships between religiosity and spirituality or between religiosity and depressive symptoms. Self-efficacy and life scheme are valid domains for the spirituality construct, and a reciprocal relationship was found between spiritual well-being and depressive symptoms. This reciprocal relationship in adolescents is discussed in terms of a Buddhist or Daoist cultural context.     

Home is My Area Code: Thinking About,Teaching, and Learning Globalization in Introductory World Religions Classes

There has been significant and growing interest in teaching religious studies, and specifically world religions, in a “global” context. Bringing globalization into the classroom as a specific theoretical and pedagogical tool, however, requires not just an awareness that religions exist in an ever‐globalizing environment, but a willingness to engage with globalization as a cultural, spatial, and theoretical arena within which religions interact. This article is concerned with the ways that those of us interested in religion employ globalization in the classroom conceptually and pedagogically, and argues that “lived religion” provides a useful model for incorporating globalization into religious studies settings.     

Ethnicity,religious belonging,and inter faith encounter: Some survey findings from East London

Mainstream religion in contemporary middle England has been described as a matter of believing without belonging (Davie, 1994). In multi‐ethnic inner city districts, however, religious belonging remains significant; indeed it is probably growing as a key dimension of ethnic and communal identity. Recent survey research in East London offers empirical evidence for this thesis and shows that both fundamentalist proselytising forms of religion and pluralist syncretistic forms are to be found. Detailed statistical analysis of the data suggest that each of these are associated with other variables, such as ethnicity, religious affiliation, and age. The patterns which emerge are complex. There can be no doubt, however, that they illustrate the continuing importance of religion as a significant variable in the daily lives of many East Enders.     

Religion and Decisions About Marriage,Residence, Occupation,and Children

Using data from the first wave of the Portraits of American Life Study (PALS), we consider the extent to which people report that religious factors influence their decisions about career choice, marriage, residency, and number of children. We find significant positive relationships between the importance of religion or religious faith and the perceived influence of religious factors on one's choice of occupation, decision about whether or whom to marry, decision about where to live, and decision about how many children to have. We also observe significant interactions between the importance of religion or religious faith and religious tradition, but we find no consistent patterns across our decision‐making outcomes. Our preliminary conclusions raise significant questions about the broader relationship between religion, perception, and decision making.     

“It Just Always Seemed Like it Wasn't a Big Deal,Yet I Know for Some People They Really Struggle with It”: LGBT Religious Identities in Context

Scholarly examinations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) religious identities have typically focused on “identity reconciliation,” which assumes that being both LGBT and religious is a “contradiction,” and posits a “coherent” identity as a desired end goal. The present research draws on a qualitative study of three LGBT‐identified congregations to demonstrate that there are a variety of ways in which LGBT religious people approach the connection between their LGBT identity and their religion. While some participants of the study did feel a need to reconcile these aspects of their self, others report never feeling a strong conflict between their LGBT identity and faith. The differences in these understandings of LGBT identity emerge out of the sociotemporal contexts the interviewees exist in, suggesting that different contexts provide divergent resources for identity performances. Through these findings, I contribute to our understanding of the intersection of religious agency, religious identities, and religion as a quality of social spaces.     

Christian God‐Talk While Listening to Atheists,Pluralists, and Muslims

In the global conversation over religious ideas, a de facto debate is raging between atheism, pluralism, and Islam. Pluralism respects the claim of every religion. Atheism respects the claim of no religion. Islam respects the claim of its own religion. How should a Christian theologian construct a doctrine of God that benefits from listening to this conversation yet stresses what is important in the gospel, namely, that the God of Jesus Christ is gracious in character? What is recommended here is to (1) investigate the truth question; (2) avoid putting God in the equations; (3) affirm what is essential; and (4) practice charity.     

Intelligibility,Moral Loss and Injustice

In Liberalism's Religion, I analyse the specific conception of religion that liberalism relies upon. I argue that the concept of religion should be disaggregated into its normatively salient features. When deciding whether to avert undue impingements on religious observances, or to avoid any untoward support of such observances, liberal states should not deal with ‘religion’ as such but, rather, with relevant dimensions of religious phenomena. States should avoid religious entanglement when ‘religion’ is epistemically inaccessible, socially divisive and/or comprehensive in scope. In turn, states should show special deference to religious observances insofar as they exhibit what I call integrity – whether personal or collective. The upshot of this interpretive strategy is that liberal law need not recognise religion as such. As a result, there are gaps between the liberal construal of disaggregated religion and the lived experience of religion as a uniquely integrated experience. Are these gaps morally regrettable? Are they unjust?     

RETHINKING THE SECULAR: SCIENCE,TECHNOLOGY, AND RELIGION TODAY

Abstract. Contemporary tensions between science and religion cannot simply be seen as a manifestation of an eternal tension between reason and revelation. Instead, the modern secular, including science and technology, needs to be seen as a distinctive historical phenomenon, produced and still radically conditioned by the religious history of the West. Clashes between religion and science thus ought to be seen fundamentally as part of a dialogue that is internal to Western religious history. While largely agreeing with Caiazza's account of the “magical” understanding of technology, I suggest that this needs to be seen as part of a more fundamental drift in religion and culture away from canonical meanings to more “indexical,” pragmatic ones—but also that technology is still inflected by soteriological meanings that were coded into modern technology at its very inception in the early modern period. I conclude by arguing that a recognition of science and technology's grounding in Western religious history can make possible a more fundamental encounter with religion.     

Belief,trust, and relationality: a Simmelian approach for the study of faith

Religion has been conceptualised as personal belief in the transcendent. Anthropologists of religion have critiqued such a construct for decades for being based on a Christian Protestant model and one that reflected subsequently modern rationalist Western culture. This construct has increasingly been shown to fail to account for the religiosity of contemporary Christians. Drawing on the sociology of Georg Simmel and based on ethnographic research in a Christian evangelical church, the article proposes a reconceptualisation of religious belief that is experiential and relational. Evangelicals in this case study show that propositional belief plays increasingly a secondary role to belief intended as trust in God and forming a relationship with God and others. Relationships mediate personal religious experience and are shown to be essential to the conversion process, the life of faith, and Christian identity. The study thus bridges the separation between theoretical and empirical works by operationalising Simmel’s sociology.     

Religion,Poverty, and Development

This article serves two purposes. First, it introduces the forum that follows in this issue on religion and development. Second, it serves as a review of the small but quickly growing literature on how religion interacts with efforts by (often religious) people and organizations to ameliorate poverty worldwide. We address the need to define both “religion” and “development” with clarity and precision. We also call for further research in this area by sociologists, particularly at a time when the landscape of development practice is shifting, from changes in funding sources and priorities to competition between religious and secular organizations.     

Religious agency,identity, and communication: reflections on history and theory of religion

Abstract

This paper discusses the applicability of recent theories of religion to the problem of describing and explaining religious transformation in the period between the final Bronze Age and Late Antiquity. Instead of evolutionist and cognitive approaches, it proposes a model of religion that tries to analyze religion in terms of its making by starting from the individual's appropriation and creation of religious tradition. Religion is understood as a strategy to attribute agency to agents that do not appear immediately plausible. Recent scholarly discussions on human agency suggest categorizing human religious agency into the three subsets, namely: (1) acting religiously with regards to past, present, and future; (2) collective religious identity; and (3) religious communication. These subsets are shown to produce fruitful questions for research on historical sources. Against this backdrop, religion is explained as a precarious cultural resource articulated through the agency of individuals and allowing changed attributions of individual agency.     

Is analytical psychology a religion? Rationalist and romantic approaches to religion and modernity

The relationship between analytical psychology and religion is part of the larger issue of the relationship between modernity and religion. There are three main views on the issue. The fundamentalist position sets religion against modernity and opts for religion over modernity. What I call the 'rationalist' position likewise sets religion against modernity but opts for modernity over religion. By contrast to both views, what I call the 'romantic' position reconciles religion with modernity. Rationalists maintain that religion can exist only in so far as it serves as an explanation of the physical world, which the rise of science now precludes. Romantics maintain that religion, while serving as an explanation of the physical world till dislodge by science, is at heart anything but an explanation. The toppling of the religions explanation by the scientific one, far from dooming religion, prods religion into making explicit what it has in fact been all along. By this categorization, Jung is overwhelmingly a romantic. For him, the function of religion has always been more psychological than explanatory, and the rise of science does not preclude the continuing existence of religious myths as a psychological rather than an explanatory phenomenon. For those for whom science does spell the demise of religion, secular myths can replace religious ones, and those secular myths are more secular versions of religions myths than secular alternatives to religions myths. Yet even if for Jung religion can still exist today because religion is in fact psychology, it does not follow that psychology is therefore a religion.     

Mental Health,Belief Deficit Compensation,and Paranormal Beliefs

The present study examined the relationship between religious and nonreligious paranormal beliefs and mental health, as well as the possibility that nonreligious subjects compensate for a lack of identification with traditional religion by increased nonreligious paranormal beliefs. Subjects were 80 undergraduates categorized as religious or nonreligious on the basis of scores on the Traditional Religion subscale of the Paranormal Belief Scale. Religious subjects had significantly higher total paranormal belief scores than nonreligious subjects. Those adopting religious paranormal beliefs were actually somewhat more likely to adopt other nonreligious paranormal beliefs. The failure of nonreligious subjects to compensate fully for this traditional religious belief deficit was reflected in their mental health ratings on the Langer's Mental Health Scale (Langer, 1962). Paranormal beliefs were found to be negatively correlated with reported symptoms of psychopathology, supporting the formulation that paranormal beliefs may serve to ensure psychic integrity by acting as “self-serving cognitive biases.”     

Mental health, belief deficit compensation, and paranormal beliefs

The present study examined the relationship between religious and nonreligious paranormal beliefs and mental health, as well as the possibility that nonreligious subjects compensate for a lack of identification with traditional religion by increased nonreligious paranormal beliefs. Subjects were 80 undergraduates categorized as religious or nonreligious on the basis of scores on the Traditional Religion subscale of the Paranormal Belief Scale. Religious subjects had significantly higher total paranormal belief scores than nonreligious subjects. Those adopting religious paranormal beliefs were actually somewhat more likely to adopt other nonreligious paranormal beliefs. The failure of nonreligious subjects to compensate fully for this traditional religious belief deficit was reflected in their mental health ratings on the Langer's Mental Health Scale (Langer, 1962). Paranormal beliefs were found to be negatively correlated with reported symptoms of psychopathology, supporting the formulation that paranormal beliefs may serve to ensure psychic integrity by acting as "self-serving cognitive biases."     

Religion,ethnicity, and citizenship: the role of Jain institutions in the social incorporation of young Jains in Britain and the United States

The on-going importance of religion as a marker of identity among young South Asians has provoked reflection on the relationship between religion and citizenship in the aftermath of events such as 9/11 and 7/7. In general, European and American scholarship highlights different perspectives on the role of religion in the social incorporation of immigrants and their children. In this article I explore how religion shapes identity and citizenship among young Jains, a group that experiences successful socio-economic integration and material success in Britain and the United States. This qualitative comparative analysis of Jain institutions which are oriented towards young Jains reveals the ways in which the intersection of transnational circulation of religious ideas and actors, national integration regimes, migration histories, and the place of religion in specific contexts shapes religious identities, religious group boundaries, and religious discourses in different ways. Different Jain religious assemblages affirm views of religion in the United States as having a positive role in the social incorporation of immigrants and their children, but point to a more neutral role for religion in the incorporation of middle-class young Jains in Britain.