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In this paper I argue that the liberal problem of religion, which defines religion in terms of dogmatism or opaque justifications based on ‘revealed truth’, needs to be rethought as part of a broader problem of dialogue, which does not define religion as uniquely problematic.

Habermas argues for religious positions to be translated into ‘generally accessible language’ to incorporate religious citizens into democratic dialogue and resist the domination of instrumental rationality by enhancing ‘solidarity’. I contrast this with Rowan Williams’ and Gadamer’s work.

Williams conceptualises religion in terms of recognising the finitude of our being, rather than dogmatism or opacity. This recognition, he argues, allows people to transcend the ‘imaginative bereavement’ of seeing others as means. Using Williams, I argue that Habermas misdefines religion, and reinforces the domination of instrumental rationality by treating religion as a means. I then use Gadamer to argue that the points Williams makes about religion can apply to secular positions too by recognising them as traditions subject to finitude.

This is original because it argues that the liberal problem of religion misdefines both religion and secular positions, by not recognising that both are traditions defined by finitude. To reach, dialogically, a ‘fusion of horizons’, where religious and secular people are understood non-instrumentally in their own terms of reference, will take time and not trade on immediately manifest – ‘generally accessible’ – meanings.

Western liberal states are considered to be secular in nature, with a presumed neutrality of state laws from religious values and norms. However, this claim overlooks the inherent influence that religious groups (namely, dominant Christian churches and groups) have as informal institutions. According to neo-institutionalists, informal institutions, like these religious norms and values, interact with and influence formal state institutions. As such, it could be argued that the norms and values of dominant religious groups within the state have a role in shaping governmental policies and the law. This is evident when examining the debates around multiculturalism and religious freedom that arise in liberal democratic states such as Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom (UK). In particular, the recent Sharia debates that have arisen in each of these jurisdictions illustrate that the secular state legal system is often positioned as “neutral” and free from religious influence – and thus incompatible with, and unable to, accommodate the religious orders of minority groups. However, this idea that the state is entirely free from religious values is a fallacy that ignores the historical role and influence of Christian churches in each state. In opposing the accommodation of Sharia in private dispute resolution, common arguments include the inherent patriarchal nature of the religion leading to further oppression and disadvantage of Muslim women when seeking resolution of personal law matters (i.e. divorce and property settlements). The secular state law is positioned against this (and religion more broadly) as the “fair” and “just” alternative for minority women – protector of individual rights. Though this ignores the inherent gender hierarchies embedded within formal state institutions, including the legal system that has been implicitly shaped by religious moral values to varying degrees – where minority women are also faced with a set of gender biases. When combined with the internal pressures from their communities and families this can often place them in a double-bind of disadvantage. In this paper, I draw on feminist institutionalism to examine the informal institutional norms that arise from dominant Christian churches in Australia, Canada, and the UK. In particular, the ways in which these informal norms have influenced the development of state laws, and continue to operate alongside the legal system to shape and influence governmental policies, laws, and ultimately the outcomes for Muslim women.

Despite the putative importance of ideological commitments in the evolution of large-scale cooperation among unrelated individuals, evolutionary researchers have yet to examine empirically the relationship between ideology and cooperation. We conduct an experimental game on Israeli kibbutz members to evaluate whether: (1) differences in ideological commitment can explain variation in cooperation within and across kibbutzim; and (2) whether certain types of ideologies are better at promoting cooperation than others. We use the cooperative behavior of Israeli city residents as a baseline and show that members of collectivized kibbutzim are more cooperative than city residents, while members of kibbutzim that have abandoned socialist ideology (privatized kibbutzim) are no more cooperative than city residents. Our results further indicate that among collectivized kibbutzim, members of religious kibbutzim are more cooperative than their secular counterparts. Religious males who engage in thrice-daily communal prayer display the highest levels of cooperation of any subpopulation in our sample. We discuss how the performance of sanctified rituals serves to internalize religious ideological commitment, thus enhancing the ability of religious ideology to motivate cooperative behavior.

This case study of Kano, Nigeria, examines changes over the past four decades in an education and labor market relationship that has evolved since the 10th century. We first offer an analysis of the historical origins of Kano’s current three-layered segmented labor market and its corresponding three distinct, but increasingly overlapping, educational pathways. We then compare the labor market entry pathways reported in 1974 and 1992 by two cohorts of young adult males, the respondents having first been surveyed as 17-year-olds in 1965 and 1979.

Despite higher levels of modern secular education in 1992 for males in all occupational destinations, apprenticeship participation was significantly lower in 1992 only for young men who entered the professional and clerical positions that dominate Kano’s public sector. Islamic training remained universal, and in fact increased significantly in years of participation across all occupational destinations. We next show that the jointly educated young men who were part of the first, more traditional sector of the labor market, were less seriously impacted in their earnings by Nigeria’s turbulent end-of-the-century economy. Finally, we discuss the possible advantages of an apprenticeship system coupled to modern secular education for moderating social inequality and stabilizing economic development in sub-Saharan Africa and other less-developed regions.

Although childhood abuse is internationally recognized as a major problem, there is a dearth of data concerning potentially protective resources, including religiosity. While studies document religiosity’s positive association with general health outcomes, little is known about its relevance to abuse in childhood. A unique opportunity to explore the relationship is provided by a community-based study of religiously diverse, adult women within a single religious denomination, Judaism. A distinctive aspect of this research, which places women’s voices and experiences center stage, is the context within which it was conducted. Israel is a deeply gendered society dominated by two patriarchal institutions, the military and religious establishments.

Detailed telephone interviews with a large, demographically diverse sample assess a broad range of women’s health issues including childhood sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. Prevalence rates are compared for observance groups at opposite ends of the religiosity spectrum, rigorously devout ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) (n = 261) and nonreligious Secular Jews (n = 181).

Unexpectedly, no significant differences between observance groups are found for any childhood abuse (45%), physical abuse (24%), or emotional abuse (40%). Childhood sexual abuse has the lowest frequency (4.8%) of all abuse categories with more reported by Secular than Haredi respondents (7.7% vs. 3.1% p = .05).

This study addresses a critical research gap with empirical evidence from adult women within a single religious denomination. To enhance generalizability, replication with other denominations and the inclusion of males is warranted.

More religious involvement apparently does not mitigate the most prevalent forms of childhood maltreatment. These preliminary, yet persuasive findings warrant more policy and prevention efforts focused on childhood abuse in all families, religious as well as nonreligious.

In this article, I analyze constructions of and responses to vulnerability in the US government and a now-prominent evangelical aid organization, World Vision, during the 1950s and 1960s in Korea and Vietnam. World Vision was founded as the “development discourse,” Cold War rhetoric, and the neo-evangelical movement were all rising to prominence in the United States. World Vision’s early understandings of vulnerability resonated with Cold War and modernization theory rhetoric in certain ways; however, its approaches to remake vulnerable Asians were often distinct. World Vision evangelical Christians looked to private voluntary organizations and individual conversions in a free society to remake individuals and nations, notions not so different from neoliberal development approaches today. US foreign aid approaches were rooted in nation-building for centralized, planned government institutions and economies to modernize “traditional” people. This article examines the complex relationships between missionaries, evangelists, US foreign aid experts and the military in American constructions of vulnerable traditional Asians and interventions to modernize and Christianize them. In examining roots of faith-based development models through the case of World Vision and notions of vulnerability, historical threads and lineages emerge for understanding the relationship of religion and the state in modernizing projects, and faith-based and neoliberal development models.

In this article, we use the case of religious research universities to explore the presence of multiple institutional logics with the potential for contradiction and conflict. In particular, building on existing research on conflicting institutional logics, we assess the most common forms of resolution (replacement, dominant logic, decoupling, compartmentalization, and coexistence) and identify the potential for a new form of resolution – a transformative outcome that resolves the conflicts through adoption of a superordinate logic. Drawing on the history of Baylor University, we illustrate different forms of resolution, proposing its most recent efforts may represent a transformative outcome. We close by presenting a model for resolving institutional contradictions which suggest some resolutions may trigger cycles of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization when they are inherently unstable because they mitigate rather than resolve the conflict between institutional logics.

Models the trade-offs between education in secular subjects, formal and informal, and the formation of religion-specific human capital. Explores some implications of negative externalities between religious and secular education. Develops hypotheses about religious tensions in the American public school system and means of coping with them. Discusses some implications for social cohesion in a religiously pluralistic school system.

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.

We investigated the effect of religion on generosity, interpersonal trust, and cooperation by using games developed by experimental economists (Dictator, Trust, and Public Goods). In these experiments, individuals were paired or grouped with unknown strangers to test the degree to which religion promotes prosocial behavior. We evaluated group- and individual-level effects of religion on prosocial behavior across the three games. Although playing the games in a religious setting showed no overall difference as compared to a secular setting, we did find a weak association between some individual-level dimensions of religiosity and behavior in some of the games. The weak association between religion and behavior is consistent with theory and empirical studies using similar measures – the anonymous pairing and grouping of the economic games may moderate individual-level effects of religion. Our research is a strong complement to the empirical literature because the three studies involved a large and diverse sample and used sensitive instruments that have been found to reliably measure prosocial behavior.