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The International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme provides an academically challenging curriculum that when combined with moral and religious formation prepares graduates of Catholic secondary schools to succeed in college and to live as Christian citizens in an interconnected global society. Although the financial cost of the program is high, this paper will argue that the adoption of the International Baccalaureate Diploma increases academic rigor at the high school level and serves as an effective marketing tool to attract students to Catholic schools. Using examples from several Catholic high schools, this paper will also examine how the International Baccalaureate can help schools deepen the realization of Catholic identity and provide educators with an ordered, humanities-based curriculum that although secular in origin draws on Catholic intellectual tradition.

The aim of this paper is to induce doubt about the ethical rightness of compulsory education laws and inspire educators to imagine and begin to make a world in which there are many different forms of gifted education. The paper does this in three ways. It paints a polemical picture of gifted education as a minor variation on public schooling and describes the contradictions and limitations this entails. It presents a short history of education in the United States to support the claim that compulsory schooling aims to shape the character of children in the interests of religion, government, corporations, and other groups. It argues that compulsory schooling is inconsistent with the liberal democratic value of the right to self-determination. The paper also offers a conception of education for self-development as one vision of what gifted education could be were it freed from the strictures of compulsory schooling.

The author examines the ability of Catholics in the American South to utilize the language of honor, a major facet of Southern political culture. The 1843 newspaper clash on the Apocrypha between Patrick Lynch (future bishop of Charleston, South Carolina) and James Henley Thornwell (influential Old School Presbyterian minister) demonstrated that Catholics in the South had adapted well to republican politics. The debate transcended doctrine and became an "affair of honor ." Catholics in the antebellum South learned to use the tools of Southern political discourse to demonstrate their sectional loyalty while rigorously defending Catholic doctrinal positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides some concluding reflections on religious education and peace-making in different countries in East and West (Indonesia, Korea, Japan, Israel, Spain, Germany, USA), as discussed in the previous papers of this volume. I mention the changed nature of modern forms of violence and war, so that peace is no longer just an option in the contemporary world, but must be an imperative if the global community is to flourish. Reference is made to the Declaration Toward a Global Ethic (1993) and the Earth Charter (2000) as helpful instruments for developing peace education. The religions of the world possess considerable seeds for peace-making which religious education can use as resources for overcoming violence and promoting a culture of peace.

After their dismal performance in election 2008, conservatives are taking stock. As they examine the causes that have driven them into the political wilderness and as they explore paths out, they should also take heart. After all, election 2008 shows that America's constitutional order is working as designed. Indeed, while sorting out their errors and considering their options, conservatives of all stripes would be well advised to concentrate their attention on the constitutional order and the principles that undergird it, because conserving them should be their paramount political priority. A constitutional conservatism puts liberty first and teaches the indispensableness of moderation in securing, preserving, and extending its blessings. Rallying around a constitutional conservatism is a wise and winning strategy. Elaborated and applied in the spirit of moderation out of which they were originally fashioned, the principles of a constitutional conservatism are crucial to the restoration of an electorally viable and politically responsible conservatism. The author talks about constitutional conservatism, describes its principles and discusses how it provides a sturdy framework for developing a distinctive agenda to confront today's challenges--an agenda that social conservatives and libertarian conservatives, consistent with their highest hopes, can both embrace.

Background: For many years, scholars in Physical Education Teacher Educator (PETE) have argued for the importance of educating pre-service teachers (PSTs) about equality (e.g. Evans, J. 1990. "Defining a Subject: The Rise and Rise of the New Physical Education?" "British Journal of Sociology of Education" 11: 155-169), sociocultural perspectives and issues (e.g. Cliff, K., J. Wright, and D. Clarke. 2009. "What Does a Sociocultural Perspective Mean in Health and Physical Education?" In "Health and Physical Education: Issues for Curriculum in Australia and New Zealand", edited by M. Dinan-Thomson, 165-182. Melbourne: Oxford University Press; Flory, S. B., Tischler, A., and Sanders, S. 2014. "Sociocultural issues in physical education: Case studies for teachers". New York: Rowman & Littlefield), and critical pedagogy (e.g. Fernandez-Balboa, J. M. 1997. "Physical Education Teacher Preparation in the Postmodern Era: Toward a Critical Pedagogy." In "Critical Postmodernism in Human Movement, Physical Education, and Sport", edited by J. M. Fernandez-Balboa, 121-138. Albany: State University of New York Press; Philpot, R (2015) Critical pedagogies in PETE: An Antipodean perspective. "Journal of Teaching in Physical Education" 34(2): 316-332). Despite this advocacy, we would argue that there are significant differences in how faculty teach about sociocultural issues, and for, social justice. The pedagogical actions through which PETEs do this work is the focus of this paper. Purpose: We investigated the pedagogical approaches and strategies used by PETE faculty to address and educate PSTs about social justice and sociocultural issues related to gender, race, sexuality, (dis)ability, socioeconomic status and religion in their individual PETE programs. In this study, we draw on transformational pedagogy (Ukpokodu, O. 2009. "Pedagogies that Foster Transformative Learning in a Multicultural Education Course: A Reflection." "Journal of Praxis in Multicultural Education" 4 (1), Article 4; Ovens, A. 2017. "Transformative Aspirations and Realities in Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE)." In "The Routledge Handbook of Physical Education Pedagogies", edited by C. Ennis, 295-306. New York: Taylor and Francis) as a framework for theorizing the data. Through this study, we highlight the pedagogical practices espoused as those that engender transformative learning. Data collection and analysis: Data for this interpretive qualitative research study was collected primarily through in-depth semi-structured interviews with over 70 PETEs who work in 48 PETE programs across Australia, Canada, England, Ireland New Zealand, Sweden, and the United States. Furthermore, an informational survey was used to gather demographic data of the participants. The participants, all current PETEs, had a wide range of professional experiences, which included the length of time in the profession, the type of institution employed, educational backgrounds and courses taught. Data analysis was completed using the processes of content analysis and the constant comparative method (Corbin, J., and A. Strauss. 2008. "Basics of Qualitative Research". London: Sage). Findings: Three major themes represent the findings. In the first theme, 'Intentional and Explicit Pedagogies,' we provide descriptions of the approaches and strategies used by PETEs in this study that were planned in advance of the learning experiences. In the second theme, 'Teachable Moments,' we provide examples of how PETEs utilized 'teachable moments' in implicit and explicit ways to educate PSTs about sociocultural issues. The third theme, 'Resistance and Constraints' captures the individual challenges PETE faculty faced within their courses if, and when, they teach for equity and social justice. The findings suggest that social justice struggles to find an explicit presence within many PETE programs and that educating PSTs about sociocultural issues and social justice is lacking in many PETE programs.

The growing prevalence of cardiovascular diseases in the United States (US) has disproportionately affected minority populations more than their white counterparts. A population that is often overlooked is the Asian American population, particularly Southeastern Asian immigrants. Despite having relatively favorable socioeconomic indicators compared to the general US population, Asian Americans, specifically Southeast Asian individuals, face a significant burden of traditional cardiovascular risk factors and are considered a high cardiovascular disease risk group. In addition, most studies have aggregated Asian populations into one major racial group rather than analyzing the different ethnicities among the Asian categorization. While some studies suggest that the acculturation process has some degree of impact on cardiovascular health, there has not been a widely-used tool to measure or ascertain the totality of acculturation. Instead, multiple proxies have been used to measure acculturation, and prior studies have argued for more culturally-tailored acculturation proxies. This paper aims to assess the implications of different acculturation measures on cardiovascular health among Asian Americans, particularly Southeastern Asian immigrants. The following proxies were expanded on in this paper: English spoken at home, length of stay in the US, religiosity and spirituality, and admixed family structures. Previous studies showed that as the length of stay in the US increases, the burden of cardiovascular risk factors increases. However, the impact of English spoken at home, religiosity, and admixed family structure are still inconclusive given the extent of current studies. While most studies suggest that an increase in acculturation increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, it is critical to note that acculturation is a multifaceted process. Therefore, more studies are necessary to appropriately examine the implications of various acculturation processes on cardiovascular risk factors in Asians, specifically Southeastern Asian individuals in the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the role of history education in developing a shared sense of identity in modern democracies. It does so by presenting findings from research into children's ideas about history in the United States and Northern Ireland, two settings that share important political and social characteristics with Canada and other pluralist countries. In the United States, the history curriculum revolves around developing a unified national identity, and it provides few opportunities for students to examine diversity within or outside the country. In Northern Ireland, schools avoid issues of identity and thus do little to help students move beyond the bonds of their own political/religious communities. A more productive way of incorporating identity into the history curriculum would involve attention to those events in a nation's past that have promoted pluralism and democracy.

Based on a study of 1689 high school teachers across 132 high schools in 12 countries, this paper discusses their views on spirituality for high school adolescents. In general, they favoured spirituality for adolescents and its inclusion in the curriculum. Specifically teachers from European countries, US, Canada and Australia attested the relational consciousness aspect of spirituality, which enabled adolescents to form and preserve meaningful social relationships and build their altruistic potential. Log regression analysis showed that spiritual assessment of adolescents was perceived as comprehending their spiritual starting point, specifically by those from European countries, US, Canada and Australia. Further, they perceived spirituality as an integral part of the moral science and value education curriculum, with the main curricular objective as cultivating adolescents' spiritual sensibilities and mindfulness. The study provides the nuances of such as curriculum on spirituality in the high schools in terms of knowledge, skills and attitude components.

A traditionally salient topic of empirical investigation in the sociology of religion, this paper seeks to offer a recent investigation into the intergenerational transmission of religion and the parental forms of religious engagement that predict adult engagement with religion. The study of this paper explores the intergenerational transmission of religion, focusing on the parental forms of religious identity and engagement that influence religious identity, beliefs, and practices in adulthood. By analyzing the 2018 GSS dataset in the United States with multiple regression analyses, I found strong parental and childhood influences on adult religiosity, religious service attendance, and belief in God. Indeed, this engagement often mirrors parental engagement for these variables. However, while paternal religious identity often predicts these religious variables, I found that the religious identity and engagement of parents generally do not predict religious identity in adulthood. Ultimately, while these results generally show strong predictive mechanisms of intergenerational transmission, they also illustrate that these relationships are variably dependent on the form of parental and adult religious engagement, and which parent participates or is associated with that engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the spring of 1893, The Moslem World debuted as America's first Islamic publication. The paper was to be the centerpiece in Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb's Indian-backed American Islamic Propaganda mission to the United States. Despite near unanimous praise from critics with regard to the printing quality of the paper, there was a mixed reaction to the paper's contents and Webb's scheme in general. The paper was only published for seven issues before financial shortfalls from India doomed the ambitious publication. As well, internal strife within Webb's movement hampered efforts to regain the necessary funding to carry on publication of the paper. In subsequent years, Webb was able to publish scaled down newspapers, but The Voice of Islam and the consolidated Moslem World and Voice of Islam were mere shadows of their predecessor and never able to fully fill the void caused by the former's collapse. This essay explores the development, publishing history, press reaction, and demise of these unique American newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on data collected in South Korea, Jordan and the USA, this paper examines the degree to which security concerns impact the schooling of North Korean refugees in South Korea and Iraqi refugees in Jordan. Operating from a framework examining the intersection of migration and securitisation, the authors find that accounts of negative images of and identity concealment among North Korean students present the most compelling linkages to a larger phenomenon of societal securitisation. At the same time, South Korean perceptions of North Koreans' level of preparedness for working in a capitalist society present the most compelling linkages to economic securitisation. With respect to Christian Iraqi refugees in Jordan, plausible connections can be drawn between societal security and an Iraqi identity generally. With respect to economic concerns in Jordan, measures taken to restrict Iraqi integration into the labour force can be seen as security actions.

In this article we analyze moviemaking as a unique pedagogy that is used in a preservice semester in Israel program for the preparation of Israel educators: Students create their own short films about an aspect of Israeli society and/or their relationship with it. We analyze the students' movies, together with students' reflective papers about the process of making them, and show how this pedagogy exhibits the major characteristics of progressive constructivist education. We also show how the pedagogy enables students to grapple with difficult aspects of Israel in a personally compelling fashion.

This study explores the relationship between religiosity, spirituality, and loneliness in the United States, using the 2018 General Social Survey to assess their interactions against a backdrop of declining traditional religious affiliation and a rise in "spiritual but not religious" identification. It examines religion and spirituality's capacity to counteract loneliness, a condition with significant health implications. The analysis uncovers complex relationships between aspects of religious life and loneliness, showing no mitigating role of spirituality when controlling for other factors, with complex and varied negative relationships of religious service attendance and self-rate religiosity to different aspects of loneliness. Yet, any potentially protective effect of religion varies, with minority religious groups reporting feelings of increased loneliness. These findings underscore religion and spirituality's nuanced roles in emotional well-being, indicating that their benefits (or not) against loneliness are complex, varied, and depend on the aspect of religion or loneliness observed, along with non-religious factors. The paper contributes to the literature on societal loneliness, changing religious and spiritual engagements, and highlighting the need for a comprehensive approach to explore the role of religion and spirituality in understanding loneliness specifically, and personal and social well-being more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study employs a poststructuralist theoretical framework to explore parents' attitudes towards children's right to play in Shanghai, China. It adopted mixed methods of online questionnaires (N = 880) and semi-structured interviews (N = 11). The findings suggest that participants struggle with embracing and practising children's right to play as defined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), reflecting culturally-sensitive and -contextualised concerns around their children's future success. Those concerns are connected with the hegemony of Confucianism in shaping educational values in Chinese education. In the context of globalisation, this paper points to the empowerment of parents in practising children's rights to play in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luke Galen (2012) offers a timely analysis of associations between religiosity and prosocial and antisocial attitudes and behaviors. After identifying 10 points of agreement, I raise 8 questions for further reflection and research: (1) Is ingroup giving and volunteerism not prosocial? (2) Are religion-related prosocial norms part of the religious factor? (3) Is social support also appropriately considered part of the religious factor? (4) Are self-report data from more and less religious people invalid? (5) How should we disentangle gender and religiosity? (6) How might we resolve "the religious engagement paradox"? (7) Does religion serve an adaptive, evolutionary function? And (8) Might research further explore religiosity, in its varieties, and prosociality? (Contains 2 figures.)

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) is widely known as a champion for the political rights of African Americans, founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), aggressive advocate of Pan-Africanism, staunch supporter of female suffrage, and one of the creative forces behind the Harlem Renaissance. Further still, Du Bois is known for his storied debates with Booker T. Washington and his magisterial "Souls of Black Folk" (1903). Those who study Du Bois and religion uniformly show how religion constituted a major part of his social scientific analysis of the world. Others document how a latent spirituality informed Du Bois's outlook on politics, economics, and society. Most of this work analyzes Du Bois's major studies and only minimally makes use of Du Bois's creative writing, with even less attention on what he wrote for "The Crisis," the NAACP's magazine that he edited from 1910 to 1934. This essay complements the existing scholarship on Du Bois and religion by attempting to more fully utilize what the author calls his "Crisis corpus." More specifically, by utilizing the latest scholarly perspectives, the author offers pedagogical strategies by sharing document-based lessons on Du Bois and religion from his own experience teaching in a secondary setting and university classroom. He discusses how he incorporates columns from the NAACP's "The Crisis" magazine into lessons on early twentieth-century America. Reading the contents of "The Crisis"--in particular the appearance of religion on its pages--can provide a more nuanced understanding of the rapid changes that defined the first few decades of twentieth-century American history. (Contains 31 notes.)

Historian of religions Charles Long uses the term "American cultural language" to identify discursive challenges to democracy and social justice in the Unites States. The American cultural language, Long says, is the "misinterpretation" of humanness and freedom conveyed when the term "American"--used to signify citizens of the United States--is constructed as applying only to persons of European descent. In a related observation, British cultural studies scholar Paul Gilroy (1993) says modern Western philosophy discourages uniting "the good" and "the right" in constructions of justice. Long and Gilroy's discussions of misinterpretation and irrationality explain some origins of exclusionary conceptions of freedom and civil/human rights. In exclusionary conceptions, freedom is limited because civil rights apply only to persons constructed as members of the human community. As assertions about how life together in society is conceived, Long and Gilroy's discussions help define the context of black women's "religious" activism. Exclusionary conceptions are incongruous with assertions that equality and social solidarity are required elements of a good society. In this article, the author talks about black women's activism, her research, and her work. Her work as a teacher and scholar has been most empowered and shaped by recognition of the clarity of vision and presence of mind necessary for black women to maintain long-term identities as civil/human rights activists. (Contains 1 footnote.)

This essay examines Alfred North Whitehead's claim that education should be construed as religious, and by extension, that music education should be religious. The analysis of questions relating to Whitehead's understanding of the notion of "religious," the defensibility of his claim, and its implications for notions of spirituality and music education and the practical work of music education is cast against the backdrop of the constitutional prohibition of the establishment of religion in the United States.

This article responds to Bruce Collet's article "From Refuge to Polis: Shifting the Rationale for Religiosity in Schools." In this rejoinder my intention is to shift the discussion from school-as-refuge to school-as-polis and to ask whether the integration interests of recent immigrants and refugees might not be better served by a more inclusive approach to religiosity in schools that is less about collective exception and more about social transformation.

In view of the limitations of mainstream Western psychology, the necessity of indigenous psychology for the development of global community psychology is discussed in the context of multiculturalism. In addition to this general introduction, four articles underlying a common theme were designed to discuss (a) various types of value conflicts between Confucian cultural heritage and Western individualism in an age of globalization; (b) the psychometric approach for measuring collectivistic conflict; (c) a counseling model of situational self-relation coordination for Chinese clients to handle interpersonal conflicts; and (d) the psychotherapeutic implications of various self-cultivation practices originating from the cultural traditions of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. The articles in this special issue may contribute to the development of indigenous counseling practice in multicultural Chinese communities.

This paper examines Nation women's engagement and resistance in the Muhammad Speaks (MS) newspaper. MS was created as the official publication of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam (NOI) in 1960. The paper employed women as journalists and invited contributions from women who had registered with the group. Women's contributions to the paper's production and content reveal their readings of NOI mandates but they equally illuminate a gentle resistance to aspects of the organization. Elijah Muhammad's NOI implemented gender roles for men and women within the organization that were often inflexible. Women embraced the organization's gender roles and found ways to navigate the patriarchal dimensions of the movement. This paper argues that a careful analysis of women's writings for the MS newspaper reveals facets of their activism that have been overlooked in existing scholarly studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article sets Dorothy Bass' Christian practices movement in critical dialogue with U.S. Latina/o popular religion in order to explore ways that these distinctive sets of practices could enrich one another. Then, it focuses on "shaping communities" as a Christian practice and correlates it with the U.S. Latina/o popular religious practices enacted by a predominantly Mexican-American congregation in East Los Angeles, California. It concludes by examining the implications for U.S. Latina/o religious education in light of Jose Irizarry-Mercado's concepts of "bilingual aesthetic and inter-cultural experience."

This essay presents Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidential rhetoric as an iteration of an American synecdochal sublime. Eisenhower's rhetoric sought to re-aim civic sight beyond corporeal objects to the nation's transcendental essence. This rhetoric is intimately connected to prevailing political anxieties and exigencies, especially the problem of "the Bomb" and the related philosophy of deterrence. Over and against the material presence of the atomic bomb, which threatened to concentrate national energies, Eisenhower advanced an expansive vision of national "spiritual" being to which corporeal images could only gesture. Correlatively, he positioned himself as a kind of priestly mediator. Therefore, he not only justified a strong deterrent stance in the Cold War, but made moral sense of it. (Contains 87 notes.)

The study reported in this paper reviewed the themes of the journal, "Theological Education," from the beginning of its publication in 1964 through 2006, as a means of gaining an historical perspective on the educational emphases that have shaped graduate theological education over the last 40 years. Theological education in the United States has developed into a substantial field of graduate professional education. The educational practices of seminaries and divinity schools are vital to faith communities across the nation, to the communities of which they are an integral part, and, subsequently, to society as a whole. "Theological Education" is one of the few published resources of scholarly works in the field of graduate theological education. There has not been a published review of the journal's themes or articles in the last 42 years. The study yielded insights into the prevailing concerns of theological educators over time, the emergence of issues and trends in theological education, and potential gaps in scholarship in the field. (Contains 3 tables.)

Wealth inequality is among the most extreme forms of stratification in the United States, and upward wealth mobility is not common. Yet mobility is possible, and this paper takes advantage of trends among a unique group to explore the processes that generate mobility. I show that non-Hispanic whites raised in Roman Catholic families have been upwardly mobile in the wealth distribution in recent decades, and I find that unique fertility, marriage and education patterns contributed to this change. I also show that Catholic values related to work and money contributed to relatively high saving and portfolio behavior that facilitated mobility. The results provide important insight into the process by which childhood experiences shape adult well-being, particularly adult wealth ownership. The findings also contribute to understanding of social inequality by identifying important behaviors and processes that facilitate mobility. (Contains 6 tables and 28 notes.)

In the face of the globalizing tendencies of our times, religious communities will depend on the appropriations and reinterpretations of traditions in constant dialogue with increasingly diverse cultural groups. Religious communities that want to respond to the challenge of cultural pluralism cannot hold to the idea of religion as something a-historical, culturally transcendent, or ethnically neutral, which will remain unchangeable by the creative force of human diversity. Instead, a more constructive approach will render religion as a culturally shaped phenomenon whose dynamism depends on the deliberate efforts to "re-ligare" every human group to a shared source of belief and faith. To invite further exploration and further dialogue on the subject of multicultural religious education, the author draws on his experience as a bilingual religious educator to propose several ways in which a new "bilingual aesthetic" could reshape religious education and practices: (1) it could assist religious educators in teaching the universality of a shared faith and mission while sustaining the value of diversity in matters of doctrines, theological approaches, worship expressions, and traditions within that faith; (2) it can offer models of communication across diverse communities without forcing assimilation to one expression of faith in the process; and (3) it can help us evoke a sense of mystery and awe for the divine.

In his critique of academic writing about and public consumption of government policy and law, Jonathan Jansen uses his argument of the symbolic functions of education law and education policy as a basis for explaining the lack of progress in achieving equity and justice under "Brown v. Board of Education" (1954) in the United States and the lack of progress in achieving social goals after 12 years of freedom in South Africa. This article presents the author's response to Jansen's article. The purpose of this author is two-fold: to build on Jansen's work so as to develop further an examination of both the U.S. and South African black education experiences with respect to: (1) the curriculum taught in schools; and (2) the experiences of students and educators in desegregated schools. This chapter argues that the efficacy of education policies and laws aimed at redressing racial discrimination and attainment of equity and social justice should be judged not only on the merits of the law or policy but on what happens within the desegregated schools in a given school system. (Contains 4 notes.)

The parallels between South Africa and the United States run deep. For the United States, that moment of transition, at least as far as education is concerned, was the landmark ruling of 1954, described in the shorthand, "Brown v. Board of Education"; for South Africa, that moment came 40 years later when every citizen could, for the first time, vote on a nonracial basis under the legal frame provided by a new constitution. There are, of course, important differences between the two countries that partly explain their different historical trajectories of oppression and struggle. Despite these differences, the long relationship between the two countries reveals often unacknowledged ties of racial oppression as well as strong bonds of racial solidarity in the struggle for freedom. Against this historical backdrop of collusion and cooperation, academics and researchers from the two countries gathered in Pretoria, South Africa, in April 2004 to reflect on the meanings of the 50th anniversary of "Brown" and the 10th anniversary of South Africa's transition to democracy. In this chapter, the author contemplates the lessons that should be drawn in this context that could inspire action and instruct thought in the ongoing struggle for equal educational opportunities in the United States and South Africa. (Contains 4 notes.)

In this article I posit the "racialization" of religion, a process that begins when certain phenotypical features associated with a group and attached to race in popular discourse become associated with a particular religion or religions. By examining the experiences of Indian Americans--a group made up primarily of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs--I explore the racialization process and show how the racialization of religion exacerbates the "othering" of non-Christian religious groups. The article goes on to examine five major outcomes of the racialization of religion, as illustrated by the experiences of Indian Americans. In particular, I show how the racialization of Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism renders those faiths theologically, socially, and morally illegitimate in the popular eye. (Contains 25 notes.)

Unity without diversity is, at best, boring, and at worse, totalitarian. Diversity without unity constantly threatens to degenerate, at best, into tensions and failures at cooperation and, at worst, into genocide. The sources of diversity in the United States are many. Racial and ethnic differences as well as differences based on national origins, social class, region, neighborhood, and sexual orientation all come readily to mind. Common ideals and beliefs such as democracy, freedom, and equal rights for all are sources of unity. The American experience has been as successful as it has because there is much that divides the people, leading to dynamic change and a creative restlessness, and because there is much that unites the people, leading to the acceptance of a shared, or communal, responsibility. However, to complete the picture and to understand both the rich diversity of American society and the unity of American society, religion and its role in society must also be taken into account. Any attempt to understand American society that disregards the contribution religion makes to both the diversity and the unity of American society will be fundamentally flawed. In this essay, first, the author notes the pervasiveness of religion in American society and how it contributes to both diversity and unity. Second, he considers how the understanding of church-state separation can either acknowledge and value the role of religion in society, or can ignore and stifle what religion has to contribute to a diverse, yet united, society.

In this paper, we present the results of a scoping review in which we examined the scientific literature (2010–2021) on faith-based organizations (FBOs) working within the field of poverty alleviation, focusing on the way studies define and use the term FBO. Fifty-two relevant studies were identified and included. Our research shows that the term FBOs is primarily used in American studies. Moreover, there is no broad consensus on the exact definition or meaning of the term nor on its scope. Because of this lack of consensus and the inherent shortcomings of the term, we suggest to replace the term FBO by the term "religion-based solidarity initiatives" (RSIs), We define RSIs as: "Initiatives that, from a religious inspiration, aim at organizing collective action for and/or providing support or services to people in vulnerable positions." These initiatives can range from small scale ad hoc initiatives till large scale formal organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: COVID-19 has devastated the United States (U.S.). One of the more notably impacted areas is the South. Compared to the rest of the U.S., the South is characterized by increased rurality, lowered access to healthcare, older populations, and higher religiosity, all of which might predispose its residents to more detrimental effects of COVID-19, including COVID-related fatalities. As such, this paper provides important considerations for individuals engaging in work with Southern, rural Americans dealing with COVID-related grief and loss. Methods: A review of the literature addressing the impact of Southern legislature, rurality, cross-country factors, and faith on COVID-related grief among Southerners was conducted, with applicable considerations expressed. Conclusions: Care should be taken by providers working with rural, Southern residents to attend to tangible and intangible losses experienced as a result of COVID-19. These considerations can help inform work with rural Southerners dealing with grief during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that stress impacts on people's religious beliefs. However, several aspects of this effect remain poorly understood, for example regarding the role of prior religiosity and stress-induced anxiety. This paper explores these aspects in the context of the recent coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). The latter has impacted dramatically on many people's well-being; hence it can be considered a highly stressful event. Through online questionnaires administered to UK (n = 140) and USA (n = 140) citizens professing either Christian faith or no religion, this paper examines the impact of the coronavirus crisis upon common people's religious beliefs. Anxiety about the coronavirus and prior religiosity showed an interaction effect upon change in religious beliefs (t(276) = 2.27, p =.024): for strong believers higher anxiety about coronavirus was associated with increased strengthening of religious beliefs (r =.249), while for non-believers higher anxiety about coronavirus was associated with increased scepticism towards religious beliefs (r = −.157). These observations are consistent with the notion that stress-induced anxiety enhances support for an individual's existing ideology already embraced before a stressful event occurs. This study sheds light on the psychological and cultural implications of the coronavirus crisis, which represents one of the most serious health emergencies in recent times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]