The Implicit Image of God: God as Reality and Psychological Well‐Being

Research has widely demonstrated that religiosity is related to psychological well‐being even in situations of severe illness. To assess religious beliefs, explicit measures have generally been used. In this study, we measured the belief that God is reality as opposed to myth or abstraction by using an implicit technique (the Single Category Implicit Association Test). The study was carried out in Italy, where a large majority of the population is Catholic, and the prevailing image of God is that of a compassionate and supportive father. Participants were cancer patients identifying themselves as believers. As expected, the automatic belief that God is reality (vs. abstraction) was related to beneficial outcomes: lower reported psychophysical anxiety symptoms and a weaker use of avoidance strategies to cope with stress. Thus, also, automatic religious beliefs may affect feelings and behaviors.     

Measuring Religion in War: A Response

We respond to Isak Svensson's reaction to our article titled “Shrouded: Islam, War, and Holy War in Southeast Asia,” which was published in Volume 53 of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.     

The Space Between: Exploring How Religious Leaders Reconcile Religion and Politics

Religious leaders, across religious traditions and demographic backgrounds, engage in politics in America. However, making sense of this is not an easy task, especially when their religious and political positions do not align. In these instances, they must somehow reconcile their incongruous positions. This article draws upon interview conversations with black religious leaders to explore how this is achieved. It is revealed that respondents bridge the space between their religious and political positions mainly by deploying three mechanisms: religious sequestration, issue minimization, and selective denial. This study contributes to our understanding of how religious leaders make sense of privileging civic and political positions over religious orthodoxy. It outlines the implications of this for black religious leaders specifically and the role of religious leaders in civic and political spheres more broadly.     

“I Was a Muslim,But Now I Am a Christian”: Preaching,Legitimation, and Identity Management in a Southern Evangelical Church

Established in 2005, “Life” is a suburban, nondenominational, evangelical church in Charlotte, North Carolina, with an almost entirely white membership, yet the lead pastor is an immigrant from the Middle East. As an ex‐Muslim ethnic Pakistani who was born and raised in Kuwait, Pastor Sameer Khalid does not “fit” into southern culture, and he did not convert to Christianity until he was enrolled in college in the United States. Ethnographic data from 14 months of fieldwork reveal how Pastor Sameer uses weekly sermons to negotiate racialized stigmas, emphasize his common religious identity with the congregation, and make his immigrant background a distinctive religious resource for the church. More specifically, while all pastors require legitimation of their charismatic authority, this research focuses on the dynamics of performance through preaching within the Sunday morning services of this congregation, a performance that negotiates this lead pastor's ethnic and religious identities and accentuates his strategic use of institutionalized evangelical narratives to subvert Islamophobic threats and buttress legitimation of his pastoral identity.     

Does Religious Belief Matter for Grief and Death Anxiety? Experimental Philosophy Meets Psychology of Religion

It is commonly reasoned that religious belief moderates death anxiety and aids in coping with loss. However, a philosophical perspective known as meta‐atheism includes the claim that avowed religious believers grieve deaths and experience death anxiety as intensely as avowed atheists. Thus, we report a study comparing religious believers and nonbelievers on measures of death anxiety and grief. We further investigated the relationships between certain religious beliefs (views of God, afterlife belief, religious orientation) and death anxiety, as well as both painful grief reactions and grief‐related growth. We surveyed 101 participants across the United States, ranging in age (19 to 57), education, and ethnicity. Participants avowing some form of religious belief, in comparison to those not, did not demonstrate lower levels of death anxiety. They did, however, display higher levels of a certain type of death acceptance. Additionally, those professing belief reported less grief and greater growth in response to loss. Greater afterlife belief was not associated with less grief; however, it was associated with both greater grief‐related growth and lower death anxiety.     

“Baba Has Come to Civilize Us”: Developmental Idealism and Framing the Strict Demands of the Brahma Kumaris

This article extends and complicates the theory that “strict churches are strong” based on the strict demands that were followed and not followed by the Brahma Kumaris in Nepal. To be successful, strict religious groups must not only be strict, but also frame their strictness in ways that resonate with the everyday experiences and commonly held beliefs of their members. Nepali women involved with the Brahma Kumaris tend to accept and follow the group's demands when those demands have been framed as modern, and that framing is resonant with the prevailing definitions of modernity offered by Western development agencies. When the modern framing is not resonant, as with the case of framing celibacy as “spiritual birth control,” the strict demand is not followed, and the frame itself is rejected in favor of the practice being defined in different terms.     

Social media addiction and psychological adjustment: religiosity and spirituality in the age of social media

Previous research indicates a significant association between social media use and psychological adjustment. The present study investigated whether religiosity/spirituality mediates the relationship between social media intrusion and psychological adjustment. Participants completed a demographic questionnaire, Religious Commitment Inventory-10, Spirituality Index of Well-Being, the DASS-21 Scales, and the Facebook Intrusion Questionnaire, which was altered slightly to include all types of social media. Results revealed that social media intrusion was significantly positively associated with depression, anxiety, and stress, and negatively correlated with spiritual well-being and the self-efficacy component of spiritual well-being. Furthermore, the self-efficacy dimension of spiritual well-being partially mediated the association between social media intrusion and psychological stress. From these results, it may be inferred that higher social media intrusion may have the ability to decrease specific aspects of spirituality, which may, in turn, negatively impact psychological adjustment. Limitations and future directions are discussed.     

From My Place: Teaching the Holocaust and Judaism at the University of Mississippi Fifty‐Three Years after James Meredith

This essay explores classroom dynamics when students identify and connect their own painful experiences to structural racism or ethnocentrism exhibited in the Holocaust or parts of Jewish history. The intrusion of this proximal knowledge can be an obstacle to student learning. If engaged by professors, however, I argue that proximal knowledge can be a catalyst that promotes learning. Social scientific theory provides a useful lens for helping students to better grasp and contextualize both their old experiences and the new materials that are being taught in the course within the larger structural frames of race, religion, and ethnicity that they have selected, but may not fully appreciate. Reflective guided journaling is an essential part of the learning experience.     

Muslim Distress Mobilization Hypothesis: complex roles of Islamic Positive Religious Coping and Punishing Allah Reappraisal in Iranian students

Muslim religious coping may include distress mobilisation effects that explain why adaptive and maladaptive forms of religious coping correlate positively rather than nonsignificantly, as they usually do in the West. In this study, 147 Iranian university students responded to Islamic Positive Religious Coping (IPRC) and Punishing Allah Reappraisal (PAR) Scales along with Religious Orientation, Perceived Stress, and mental health measures. IPRC and PAR correlated positively, and procedures accounting for their covariance were essential in disambiguating their implications. IPRC predicted stronger Intrinsic and Extrinsic Personal Religious Orientations, but PAR displayed no relationship with religious motivations. PAR pointed toward broadly negative mental health influences with IPRC displaying limited ties with adjustment. PAR partially mediated some Perceived Stress relationships with poorer mental health. These data offered some support for a Muslim Distress Mobilization Hypothesis, but also uncovered issues that require further clarification.     

Centering prayer’s effects on psycho-spiritual outcomes: a pilot outcome study

Centering prayer is a spiritual and religious form of meditation grounded in the history of Christian contemplative prayer. Despite its popularity, empirical research investigating centering prayer’s effects on psycho-spiritual outcomes is relative sparse. This pilot outcome study explored the effect of a centering prayer workshop on participants’ (N?=?9) depression, anxiety, stress, spiritual transcendence, religious crisis, faith development, and mindfulness. Several significant changes were noted over the course of the six-week study, including decreased anxiety and stress, and increased faith development and mindfulness. Interestingly, we noted that participants likely also experienced a spiritual or religious struggle that follows the established spiritual development paradigm called the Dark Night of the Soul. The study did not include a control group, and so did not account for effects related to history, maturation, or regression to the mean. Nevertheless, the initial results prove promising to develop more sophisticated research programmes that replicate the study’s findings.