Digital Commons Network^™

Religion And Family Relational Health: An Overview And Conceptual Model, Loren Marks

Faculty Publications

This paper presents a review of research addressing religion and family relational health. Strengths of the extant data include the correlation of three dimensions of religious experience (religious practices, religious beliefs, and religious community) with certain aspects of mother–child, father–child, and marital relationships and specific connections between the three dimensions of religious experience and family relationships are identified. Key weaknesses in the research at present include a paucity of research examining the hows, whys, and processes involved behind identified religion–family correlations and a lack of data on non-nuclear families, families of color, interfaith families, and non-Christian religions including Judaism and …

Recoiling From Religion, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

This is an essay reviewing Professor Marci A. Hamilton's book, GOD VS. THE GAVEL: RELIGION AND THE RULE OF LAW (Cambridge Univ. Press 2005).

Professor Marci Hamilton has written a forceful and obviously heartfelt book that should give pause to committed champions of religious free exercise. She argues convincingly that religious freedom is too often invoked to shield opprobrious and socially harmful activity, and she describes numerous examples of such abuses that make any civilized person's blood run cold. Her avowed aims are to debunk the “hazardous myth” that religion is “inherently and always good for society” and to increase …

Historical Perspectives On Attitudes Concerning Death And Dying, David San Filippo Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

Beliefs and practices concerning death have changed throughout human history. In pre-modern times, death at a young age was common due to living conditions and medical practices. As medical science has advanced and helped humans live longer, attitudes and responses to death also have changed. In modern Western societies, death is often ignored or feared. Changes in lifestyles and improved medical science have depersonalized death and made it an encroachment on life instead of part of life. This has left many people ill equipped to deal with death when it touches their lives.

Philosophical, Psychological & Spiritual Perspectives On Death & Dying, David San Filippo Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

This Ebook reviews the philosophical perspectives on death, the psychological perspectives on death and the fears of death and some religious perspectives of death. The philosophic section will review perspectives of death from ancient Greece through modernity. The psychological section will review death, and the fear of death, from the perspectives of psychoanalytic, humanistic, and existentialist theories. The religious section will provide a brief overview of Prehistoric, African, Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, and Christian religious beliefs concerning death and afterlife.

Play In The Joints Between The Religion Clauses' And Other Supreme Court Catachreses, Carl H. Esbeck

Faculty Publications

Consistent with its fumbling of late when dealing with cases involving religion, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken to reciting the metaphor of play in the joints between the Religion Clauses. This manner of framing the issue before the Court presumes that the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses run in opposing directions, and indeed will often conflict. It then becomes the Court's task, as it sees it, to determine if the law in question falls safely in the narrows where there is space for legislative action neither compelled by the Free Exercise Clause nor prohibited by the Establishment Clause. The …

Governance And The Religion Question: Voluntaryism, Disestablishment, And America's Church-State Proposition, Carl H. Esbeck

Faculty Publications

The quandary over how to structure the relationship between religion and the civil state is an ancient one. From the perspective of political philosophy this is the religion question, and events over many centuries have proven that the answer is easy to get wrong. Religion, by its very definition, is the fixed point from which all else is surveyed. It is about ultimate matters, both micro and macro. Hence, religion addresses the irreducible core of personhood and its meaning, while at the same time religion embraces a worldview that transcends and encompasses everything else. Religion generates intense emotions that when …

Why The Catholic Majority On The Supreme Court May Be Unconstitutional, Symposium On Catholicism And The Court, Michael J. Gerhardt

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Understanding The Purpose Of Creation Accounts, Terry Ball

Faculty Publications

Jeopardy is a popular and longrunning TV game show in the United States. It is somewhat unusual in the world of game shows. In typical game shows, contestants are asked questions and then awarded money for providing correct answers. But, in Jeopardy that process is reversed: the contestants are given the answers and then receive money for correctly providing the questions. For example, contestants might be given the answer "a biblical measurement of volume approximately equivalent to eight gallons." The contestant who first correctly asks the question "What is an ephah?" would then be awarded money. Unlike much of what …

The Family As A Context For Religious And Spiritual Development In Children And Youth, Chris J. Boyatzis, David C. Dollahite, Loren D. Marks

Faculty Publications

Our chapter addresses how the family promotes or hinders transcendence of the self in children, that is, how the family is a context in which spiritual development occurs. Due to space limitations, our emphasis is on socialization and interaction processes within the family and not on other issues such as psychodynamic processes (e.g., Rizzuto, 1979) or faith development (e.g., Fowler, 1981). There are many motivations to explore family socialization of religious and spiritual development. One, family spirituality and religiosity are linked with many desirable outcomes and inversely with negative outcomes in children and youth. (Other chapters in this volume examine …

Triptych: Sectarian Disputes, International Law, And Transnational Tribunals In Drinan's "Can God And Caesar Coexist?", Christopher J. Borgen

Faculty Publications

Can international law be used to address conflicts that arise out of questions of the freedom of religion? Modern international law was born of conflicts of politics and religion. The Treaty of Westphalia, the seed from which grew today's systems of international law and international relations, attempted to set out rules to end decades of religious strife and war across the European continent. The treaty replaced empires and feudal holdings with a system of sovereign states. But this was within a relatively narrow and historically interconnected community: Protestants and Catholics, yes, but Christians all. Europe was Christendom.

To what extent …