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Over the last few years, there has been an increase of research interest on the role of religion in disaster. While some emphasize the positive role of religions during and after disasters, others rather point out that religion may lead to low perception of risk and create a fatalistic attitude in the face of such events. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the vivid debate on the role of religious beliefs and practices in disaster response and recovery, using the earthquake that hit Padang city in Indonesia in 2009.

A review of reports and policy documents published by the government and non-government organizations was done to understand external aid provided during and after the 2009 earthquake. Fieldwork was conducted from April to May 2016 in Padang city. Interviews were done with religious followers and leaders of the Muslim community, as the main religion in the country, and Confucians community, as the biggest minority in the area.

Drawing on interviews done with religious followers and leaders, the study highlights that religious beliefs and practices bond local people together and contributed to successful coping with disasters. It also emphasizes that religious communities can fill response and recovery gaps, such as when external intervention is limited.

Religious beliefs and practices, combined with other mechanisms, should be integrated within disaster risk reduction disaster management and activities as this would help build more resilient communities.

Indonesia is a country where religion is very important, being the biggest Muslim country worldwide. It is also highly vulnerable to natural-hazards related disasters. Yet, little research has been done in Indonesia on the role of religion during and after disasters. This paper aims to explore the role of religious beliefs and practices in disasters in the area where religion plays an important role in people’s everyday life.

This paper aims to investigate how do Muslims, Christians and Kaharingan adherents conduct interreligious relations among them in their everyday lives in Central Kalimantan; why do these religious communities observe interreligious relations as such; and what makes this model of interreligious relations.

The corpus for analysis comes from in-depth interviews with 20 persons, which took place between August and October in 2016 in Palangka Raya city and Kotawaringin Timur Regency in Central Kalimantan Province, Indonesia. The informants were selected from groups believed to be lay members and elites of Muslim, Christian and Kaharingan communities using snowball sampling technique facilitated by local research assistants. These informants are mainly mainstream Muslims, Christians and Kaharingan adherents.

The way to peaceful and co-existence life lived by religious communities in Indonesia is closely related to its rich treasures and precious tradition of cultural heritage: Indonesian communalism, Indonesian community spirit as seen in terms such as “tradisi hidup bersama,” “semangat kebersamaan” and “satu keluarga.” Instead of emphasizing the divisive differences among communities with various religious backgrounds, Muslims, Christians and Kaharingan adherents in Central Kalimantan create “third spaces,” common grounds shared by these religious communities at individual, institutional and societal levels.

Based on empirical findings, this research argues that the practices of peaceful and co-existence life lived by diverse religious communities in Indonesia relate to their particular social-cultural contexts of rich treasures and precious tradition of cultural heritage in the forms of Indonesian communalism and community spirit. Instead of emphasizing the divisive differences among themselves, various religious communities in Central Kalimantan create third spaces, common grounds between them and are shared by them at individual, institutional and societal levels.

The present study investigates the relationship between servant and authoritarian leadership, and leaders’ third-party conflict behaviors in followers’ conflicts, thereby contributing to integrating knowledge on leadership styles and leaders’ third-party conflict behaviors. This study aims to investigate leadership and conflict management in a context hardly studied: local religious communities or convents within a female religious organization.

The authors collected quantitative survey data from 453 religious sisters, measuring their perception of leaders’ behaviors. These religious sisters live in local religious communities within a Catholic Women Religious Institute based in Nigeria (West Africa) and in other countries across the globe.

Results show that servant leadership relates positively to leaders’ third-party problem-solving behavior and negatively to leaders’ avoiding and forcing. Moreover, authoritarian leadership relates positively to leaders’ third-party avoiding and forcing behaviors.

This study expands theory development and practices on leadership and leaders’ third-party conflict behaviors. The authors associate servant and authoritarian leadership with leaders’ third-party conflict behaviors: avoiding, forcing and problem-solving, in followers’ conflicts. The authors offer practical recommendations for religious leaders on servant leadership and leaders’ third-party conflict behaviors.

Intellectual humility and religious conviction are often posed as antagonistic binaries; the former associated with science, reason, inclusive universality, and liberal secularism, the latter with superstition, dogma, exclusive particularity, and rigid traditionalism. Despite popular images of white American evangelicals as the embodied antithesis of intellectual humility, responsiveness to facts, and openness to the other, this article demonstrates how evangelicals can and do practice intellectual humility in public life while simultaneously holding fast to particularistic religious convictions. Drawing on textual analysis and multi-site ethnographic data, it demonstrates how observed evangelical practices of transposable and segmented reflexivity map onto pluralist, domain-specific conceptualizations of intellectual humility in the philosophical and psychological literature. It further argues that the effective practice of intellectual humility in the interests of ethical democracy does not require religious actors to abandon particularistic religious reasons for universal secular ones. Rather, particularistic religious convictions can motivate effective practices of intellectual humility and thereby support democratic pluralism, inclusivity, and solidarity across difference. More broadly, it aims to challenge, or at least complicate, the widespread notion that increasing strength of religious conviction always moves in lockstep with increasing dogmatism, tribalism, and intellectual unreasonableness.

Muslims' commitment to religious learning and its institutions speaks of a genuine interest in a lifestyle characterized by education and wisdom, spiritual and religious well-being, in addition to sustainable intellectual and socio-cultural conditions of their communities. At the core of these critical contributions however, lays the question of the interplay between religious learning and community building, and the means according to which religious learning is continually the driving force for development and prosperity. This study aims to examine a number of questions pertaining to the character of Islamic religious learning while exploring the problems impeding religious learning from the effective development of the community. Specifically, this research draws on the perspectives of two prominent Muslim scholars, ‘Abdul Rahman Ibn Khaldun and Mohammad Tahir Ben Achour in an attempt to further understand the dilemmas impairing the position of Islamic religious learning in relation to the general context of Muslim communities. This inquiry opens new fields of critical inquiry on the role of religious learning today and brings to light some of the issues causing declining influence on the effective development of Muslim communities.

Examination of Islamic sources to develop conceptual framework on the issue of religious learning and community.

Ingraining the mind with varying degrees of information on a particular Islamic subject or mastery of a particular textbook without challenging students' minds with on-going problems and challenges, emerging ideas or trends, or growing emotions and behaviors; only causes memorized lessons to creep into stagnancy and inertia, thus shifting attention to the form and shape of learning as opposed to its essence and implications for community change and development. This calls for a systematic review of Islamic religious learning in such a way that it draws essentially from the primary sources of Islamic thinking while drawing learners closer to the folds of piety and moral discipline, embracing social change as a validating parameter for effective learning, while continually building active bridges with the surrounding community.

Research relied on original Islamic sources including works of Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Achour.

Religious minority groups often enjoy strong support systems and high levels of trust, providing for volunteering within the community, but under what conditions are members of these groups likely to volunteer outside their community? Or, would they prefer the security, intimacy and commitment to their own communities. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

To answer this question, the authors examine the motivations of ultra-Orthodox young men who volunteered for National Civil Service in Israel, and compare the choices of volunteer frameworks: separatist-religious volunteering within the community compared to volunteering in secular institutions outside the community.

The authors associate the interest and motivations with different types of social capital, “bonding” and “bridging.”

Research based on one case study.

Guidelines for encouraging volunteering among closed groups.

Understanding of motivations and concerns among religious groups.

An original study of a relatively new phenomenon.

Places of worship have historically been maintained using traditional building management techniques, including regular monitoring, upkeep and maintenance provided by their religious communities. This paper examines the conservation issues arising after the forced displacement of the traditional custodians, which is a significant concern in conflict-ridden environments.

As a unique example of a long-term conflict, the divided Cyprus provides this research with illustrative cases to derive the data. The research employs content analysis of official documents, physical observations and interviews with conservation professionals.

This research demonstrates the human and environmental factors impacting the conservation of the material fabric and the use-related challenges stemming from the intangible significance of the religious legacy belonging to displaced communities. It highlights the urgency to formulate more effective mechanisms and regulatory frameworks to address vulnerability issues promptly.

Preservation problems on religious heritage buildings arising from the loss of traditional custodians after conflicts are an under-researched area in conservation literature. Drawing on research that was conducted several decades after the displacement of Cypriot communities, this paper reveals new insights into the magnitude of the conservation problems and the use-related complexities that need to be addressed to formulate mutually acceptable solutions for a sustainable future.

This chapter embarks on a cross-Asian comparison to glean valuable insights from various regions and religious contexts. By examining family planning practices and challenges in different parts of Asia, valuable lessons are uncovered that can inform policies, programs, and initiatives aimed at achieving family planning-related sustainable development goals (SDGs). The complexities and nuances of family planning across diverse cultural, social, and religious landscapes are delved into, shedding light on both common threads and unique challenges faced by marginalized communities. Through this comparative analysis, the aim is to contribute to a holistic understanding of family planning in Asia and provide actionable recommendations to enhance access, equity, and outcomes in pursuit of family planning-related SDGs.

Legal and philosophical scholarship on religious education typically focuses on religious schools that challenge core liberal values. Religious schools that offer their students quality secular education, and whose religious character is mild, do not raise these concerns and have therefore evaded scrutiny thus far. This chapter argues that the latter kind of religious schools, which I call “creaming religious schools,” may have a negative effect on educational equality and should therefore be subject to restrictive legal regulation. The negative effect on equality is caused by the fact that when successful, these schools appeal not only to members of the religious community but also to non-member high-achieving students who leave the public schools (a process called creaming) thus weakening them. The chapter argues that the harm caused to public schools cannot be redeemed by alluding to the right to religious education because the religious justification for creaming religious schools is relatively weak. The chapter then examines several potential legal measures for contending with creaming religious schools: the antidiscrimination doctrine, which the chapter rejects, showing that it actually aggravates creaming, locating schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods, restricting tuition, reflective enrollment policy, and finally, the total prohibition of establishing creaming religious schools.

Prior research has investigated the development of Islamic communities. The authors contribute to this line of research by analyzing the effects of Islamic values and Islamic religious practices on entrepreneurship intentions in Islamic communities. Using theory of planned behavior as a theoretical lens, they also take into account that the relationship between religion and entrepreneurial intentions can be mediated by individual’s attitude toward entrepreneurship.

The authors analyze primary data obtained from a sample of 1,895 Pakistani university students. They also use structural equation modeling to perform a nuanced assessment of the relationship between Islamic values and practices and entrepreneurship intentions and to account for mediating effects.

The results show that both Islamic values and Islamic practices positively influence entrepreneurship intentions. Both effects are mediated by the attitude toward entrepreneurship.

The authors contribute to prior research on entrepreneurship in Islamic communities by applying a more fine-grained approach to capture the link between religion and entrepreneurship. Further, they contribute to the literature on entrepreneurship intentions by showing that the influence of religion on entrepreneurship intentions is mainly due to religious values and practices, which shape the attitude toward entrepreneurship and thereby influence entrepreneurship intentions in religious communities.