Discourse concerning religion in the American public sphere exists within what Miller (2012) describes as church decline narratives. Highlighting the declining significance of organized religion, these narratives conform neatly with notions of young adults' relationships to formal authority broadly speaking and religious institutions in…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between interfaith engagement and self-authored worldview commitment among 13,776 students enrolled at one of 52 institutions. Results indicated an association between formal and informal interfaith engagement and that this relationship was conditioned upon self-identified worldview.…

Faced with America's stratified religious landscape, colleges and universities work to embrace spiritual diversity through inclusive discourse, initiatives and programs. Nationwide, some campuses have focused on the rise in religious diversity and mending the religious fractures that persist. They have crafted programs aimed at letting a shifting…

In the Fall of 2009, the author participated in the sixth conference of Interfaith Youth Core, an organization and social movement devoted to building "mutal respect and pluralism among young people from different religious traditions by empowering them to work together to serve others". On that occasion, Dr. Eboo Patel, founder and…

Background: Adolescent involvement in religious organizations has been hypothesized to protect against early age at first drink. However, the correlation between adolescent religiosity and later age at first drink may be confounded by environmental or genetic differences between families. This study tests whether, after controlling for shared…

There seems to be an unwritten agreement among most Americans that there are three topics that are best avoided in polite company: (1) politics; (2) personal finances; and (3) religion. The American reluctance to discuss religion with acquaintances at a dinner party or picnic may be a part of a larger phenomenon: a manifestation of the secularism…

Based on individual-level data from 2008 Afro-barometer survey, this study explores the relationship between religion (religious affiliation and religious importance) and trust (interpersonal and institutional) among Ghanaians. Employing hierarchical multiple regression technique, our analyses reveal a positive relationship between religious…

Latent growth curve modeling was used to describe longitudinal trends in community and religious involvement and Marcia's (1966) four identity statuses (diffusion, foreclosure, moratorium, and achievement), as well as to assess relations between involvement and identity change. Cross-lagged regression models explored temporal ordering of relations…

Indonesia's Islamic revival has coincided with the growing involvement of women in civil society. Muslim women's organizations are playing an important role in how the Indonesian nation-state is being re-imagined for the 21st century. Muslim women's groups are incubators for women's diverse political activism. The increasing role of Islam in the…

Despite 15 years of sporadic efforts, religion today in Bosnia and Herzegovina is more of a hindrance than a help to promoting peaceful coexistence among the region's various ethnic and religious groups. Polarization and extremism make religions other than one's own even more distant, strange and threatening. Physical interaction that existed…

The activities of religious organizations have been the cause of numerous disputes first and foremost because it was only relatively recently that these organizations came to be involved as active agents in antinarcotics policy, and there is little if any unanimity of opinion as regards how "useful" or "harmful" they are in…

Religious organizations offer a potentially rich pool of caring adults who are driven by their own spiritual commitments and a strong ethic to serve others. Indeed, more Americans volunteer through religious organizations than through any other venue. Religious organizations account for half of all volunteering, with an estimated 60 percent of the…

Using the secularization theory and the Marxist notion of religion as masking class conscience one would expect the importance of religion and religious involvement today to wane and be limited to lower class members. To challenge this expectation, using a representative national telephone survey of 2004 youth (ages 11-18) and their parents, we…

Organizational religiosity is analyzed with data from a national survey of faith-based social service coalitions (N = 656). Twenty-one items related to religious practices within these organizations result in three distinct factors: service religiosity, staff religiosity and organizational religiosity scales. Self-defined faith-based coalitions…

This research examined two separate but related issues in Nigerian education. One, it attempted to assess the impact of Islamic and Western-type institutions upon the acquisition of religious knowledge and performance of religious duties among Hausa Muslim youth. Second, it addressed itself to measuring the religious devoutness of Muslims by…