Religious Right,Religious Left,Both, or Neither? Understanding Religio‐Political Identification

In this article we analyze the effects of religious, political, socioeconomic, and demographic variables on religious Americans’ propensity to identify with religio‐political movements. Using data from the 2013 Economic Values Survey collected by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), we sort nonsecular Americans into four categories: religious right, religious left, both religious right and religious left, or neither religious right nor the religious left. We estimate a multinomial logit model in which we depict religio‐political identification as a function of religious affiliation, worship attendance, religious embeddedness, religious convictions, political attitudes, and socioeconomic and demographic controls. We find that a wide range of religious, political, and socioeconomic/demographic variables affect individuals’ identification with the religious right and/or religious left. Our empirical results also permit us to analyze the seeming paradox of identifying with both the religious right and the religious left. We find that individuals who identify with both movements come from the ranks of the highly religious, those who believe that being moral requires one to believe in God, Tea Party supporters, strong partisans, those with lower education and income, older individuals, and blacks and Hispanics.     

What can debunking do for us (sceptics and nihilists)?

Debunking arguments in metaethics are often presented as particularly challenging for non‐naturalistic versions of moral realism. The first aim of this paper is to explore and defend a response on behalf of non‐naturalism. The second aim of the paper is to argue that although non‐naturalism’s response is satisfactory, this does not mean that debunking arguments are metaethically uninteresting. They have a limited and indirect role to play in the exchange between non‐naturalists and moral error theorists. In the end, debunking arguments can do less for sceptics and nihilists than what is commonly thought, but not nothing.     

Counselor Understanding of Native American Spiritual Loss

Although the multicultural counseling literature includes numerous references to working with Native Americans, this population continues to be misunderstood and underserved. A series of interviews with Native Americans provided insight into the deep spiritual pain experienced as a result of the historical and current events that continue to affect their families and communities. J. W. Worden's (1991) “tasks of mourning” provided the framework for the interviews.     

Children's Responses to Group-Based Inequalities: Perpetuation and Rectification

The current studies investigate whether, and under what conditions, children engage in system-perpetuating and system-attenuating behaviors when allocating resources to different social groups. In three studies, we presented young children with evidence of social group inequalities and assessed whether they chose to perpetuate or rectify these inequalities. Children (aged 3.5-11.5 years) heard about two social groups (i.e., racial or novel groups) whose members received resources unequally(two cookies versus one). Participants were then given the opportunity to distribute additional resources to new members of the same groups. In Experiment 1, when children were presented with inequalities involving groups of Blacks and Whites, older children (aged 7.5-11.5 years) rejected the status quo, providing more resources to members of groups with fewer resources (White or Black), whereas younger children (aged 3.5-7.5 years) perpetuated the status quo. In Experiments 2 and 3, the inequalities involved Asians and Whites and novel groups. Children of all ages perpetuated inequality, with rectification strategies applied only by older children and only when Black targets were involved in the inequality. Equal sharing occasionally occurred in older children but was never a common response. These findings provide evidence that system-perpetuating tendencies may be predominant in children and suggest that socialization may be necessary to counter them.