Journal of Religion and Society

This paper examines the propensity of theological, political, and/or denominational progressive Christians to have affinity or disaffinity towards Christian fundamentalist and atheists. Thermometer questions on the American National Election Studies assess how progressive Christians rank Christian fundamentalists and atheists. Theological and political progressive Christians are shown to have disaffinity toward, or dislike of, fundamentalist Christians and are relatively less likely to have affinity towards, or to like, conservative Christians while they are less likely to have disaffinity towards, or to not like, atheists. Political progressive Christians also tend to have affinity with atheists. Belonging to a progressive Christian denomination did not have any effects on the affinity/disaffinity towards either Christian fundamentalists or atheists. These relationships remain after application of social and demographic controls.

Based on self-report data of college students from Malaysia (N = 1,359) and the United States (N = 1,629), crime rates of the two samples are compared. Criminal behavior is much more common in the American sample despite the country's greater wealth. Negative binomial regression analysis reveals that the lower alcohol consumption and especially the greater religiosity of the Malaysian students help explain their lower crime rate. Theoretical implications, study limitations, and avenues for future research are discussed.

The article examines autobiographies of persons who have belonged to different Islamic groups. The so-called cycle of engagement of an individual person – a "personal protest cycle" – to the Islamic activism is examined through the autobiographies. The main questions will be: how did one become an Islamic activist; how did the actual engagement occur; how did the activism evolve and how did the disengagement from the activism take place? Politics of emotions forms a general framework for understanding political activism and, more generally, protest or oppositional politics.

Neo-Pentecostalism is characterized as offering freedoms and empowerment for women, a limited role in navigating patriarchy, or strengthening patriarchal control. In Nairobi, Kenya, neo-Pentecostalism is concerned with a morality built around an idealized model of the nuclear family in which a wife is subservient to her husband. It might appear that women's ministries empower female members to challenge structures of control, but such challenges are resisted and women are expected only to survive within existing structures. Single-women are expected to live amongst the prejudices of society and dissuaded from any attempt to alter the societal structures that leave them marginalized.

This article illustrates how the 2015 adhan controversy exposed tensions between Protestant, pluralist, and secular paradigms at Duke University. It challenges both historical and contemporary models of the relationship between religion and higher education that assert the predominance of a single paradigm by illustrating how all three have been present throughout Duke's history, evolving and interacting through complex and contingent ebbs and flows. An interactive model is proposed for comparing how particular institutions at times have balanced (a) honoring a majority religious heritage, (b) fostering a religiously inclusive environment, and (c) creating power structures fair to all.

The science of happiness is a developing field which attempts to measure the health and emotional well-being of populations by reliable social survey techniques. One strand of research suggests that religious practice (believing and belonging) are positively associated with well-being measures. This paper assesses new evidence on the relationship between religiosity and the different dimensions of well-being (hedonic and eudaimonic). It makes direct comparisons between an opportunity sample of Evangelical Christians in the UK, and the reports of UK Office of National Statistics surveys of representative samples of the UK population. Evangelicals do show high scores on many standard indicators, with differences from the national population on eudaimonic scales that reach statistical significance. Their lifestyles are generally consistent with good health and well-being outcomes. However, when age profiles and income/social class are considered it remains to be established whether evangelical faith adds significant and measurable value to people's health and well-being, at least within this mortal life

This paper explores the penetration of Pentecostalism's discursive emphasis on rupture and discontinuity into the everyday lives of believers in authoritarian Chile. I argue that Pentecostal memories of the Pinochet dictatorship reflect a less categorical conceptualization of rupture and reveal the dense web of connections and identities that adherents utilized to find meaning and solutions to the struggles they faced in daily life. I further argue it is necessary to gauge Pentecostals' religious identities and cosmologies during the period through a wider historical framework. They were intimately folded into the long history of violence, oppression, and marginalization in which they were embedded.

The reinterpretation of religious ideas and beliefs through literary works has become an established literary genre. While some of these works seek to challenge religious authority on historical grounds, others question the relevance of traditional religious beliefs in providing solutions to our existential problems. Two works in this genre, the well-known thriller The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and the critically acclaimed book The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Nobel Prize winning Portuguese author José Saramago, exemplify these diverse tendencies in employing fiction to probe religion. In the former, the authenticity of religious facts is questioned while the latter utilizes fiction to show the inadequacy of religious beliefs in answering our deepest problems. This paper contends that the confrontation with religious dogma in these two works is an expression of intellectual movements and ideologies, The Da Vinci Code relying on New Age ideology while The Gospel According to Jesus Christ drawing on existentialist themes. It also shows how these ideologies themselves are driven by the underlying religious polarities of the sacred and the profane.

It is sometimes thought that public shaming is a new phenomenon, only emerging with the advent of the Internet and, in particular, with the rapid growth of social media. Yet, from a historical and religious viewpoint public shaming can be seen as a modern version of legal penal practices that were common in the Middle Ages and occasionally resorted to in subsequent years. In this article, we survey the various modes of public shaming within the Jewish community in the Middle Ages and in modern times. We review whether and how the new practice of communications shaming on social media has been adopted by religious institutions as an extension of communal, traditional shaming, and discuss how rabbis relate to this today.