Cultural Influences on Opinion Expression in an Online and Offline Context

This study compares the expression of opinion in incongruent offline and online settings regarding the issue of gender desegregation in Kuwait’s public schools. Spiral of silence theory provides the theoretical foundation for examining the impact of certain cultural factors and religious influences on the expression of opinion, their relationship to the fundamental tenets of the theory, such as fear of social isolation, and Twitter use variables among respondents to a survey. The results to a questionnaire administered to 534 public and private university students indicate greater overall expression of opinion in the offline than online context. Offline and online, the nonconformist personality variable was a positive predictor of expression of opinion, and fear of social isolation was a negative predictor. The perceived position of Islam on the issue was a predictor of expression of opinion only in the offline context. Finally, daily average use of Twitter was an additional predictor of expression of opinion in the online environment.

Integrative Conclusions

This chapter presents general conclusions based on integrating the theory and the results obtained from all methods. It also offers seven specific conclusions for each of the prosperity determinants considered.Combining three main factors accounted for uneven socio-economic and institutional performance in Europe and the Americas. These factors are: 1. Religion: 1.1) Historical Protestantism and its positive influence on law, institutions, and language (highest performance); 1.2) anti-clericalism (medium-high performance); 1.3) Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy (medium-low performance); 1.4) Syncretism (low performance). 2. Political non-religious influences: 2.1) Communism (low performance). 3. Geography and environment, which modulate overall performance.

The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion

The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion provides the first scholarly survey of the connections between literature, religion, and intellectual life during the British Romantic period (1780s–1832). The collection of seventeen scholarly essays introduces the diverse religious influences on the literature of the times. Part one, “Historical Developments,” surveys diverse religious communities, texts, and figures that shaped British Romantic culture, investigating the influence of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and atheism on the literature of the times. Part two, “Literary Forms,” considers British Romanticism and religion through attention to major genres such as poetry, the novel, drama, sermons and lectures, and life writing. Part three, “Disciplinary Connections,” explores links between religion, literature, and other areas of intellectual life during the period, including philosophy, science, politics, music, and painting.

Organ Transplant in Present-Day Japan: Reasons behind Low Numbers of Deceased Donors

According to the International Register of Organ Donation and Transplantation, Japan is one of the countries with the lowest number of registered deceased donors. In 2019, Japan was ranked 61st out of 70 countries. The authors of this article have decided to explore the reasons for this phenomenon. In the first part of the work, religious influences (Shinto and Buddhism), the tradition of gotai manzoku, the importance of altruism and the family in the perception of death and organ transplantation by the Japanese are considered. The second part of the article presents the arguments of Alan Shewmon, who believes that brain death is not death in the biological sense. Undermining the brain’s death criterion raises doubts concerning death of patients in irreversible coma, what in result discourages transplantology in Japan. In the third part, the authors compare the results of JOTN, IRODaT and the Fact Book of Organ Transplantation 2018 in Japan from 2010 to 2018. The aim of the article is to explain the cultural determinants of transplantology in Japan, taking into account the influence of philosophical and bioethical aspects of human death.

In the Name of the Father? Fertility, Religion, and Child Naming in the Demographic Transition

This article shows that parents reveal information about their fertility behavior through how they name their children. I arrive at this finding from a detailed examination of the net fertility of 130,000 married couples in Ireland, a country known for its historically high fertility rate, circa 1911. After stringently accounting for couples' occupation, religion, and location, I find higher fertility rates among couples who chose distinctly Catholic names and traditional names for their children, with the latter being particularly important. Exposure to towns and cities lowered net fertility and weakened preferences for traditional and Catholic names. Cumulatively, these findings highlight the role of traditional rural norms over explicitly religious influences in driving high fertility rates in Ireland. The impact of towns and cities in reducing net fertility suggests that Ireland's sluggish urbanization was a key factor in its high historical fertility rate.

Prologue I

Prologue I, God and Buckley at Yale (1951); Prologue II, Henry Sloan Coffin’s Yale (1897); Prologue III, Yale Embattled: Noah Porter versus William Graham Sumner (1880). Three historical vignettes in reverse historical order suggest changing stages regarding how Christianity might be related to a modern university. William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) challenged the university’s claims to be Christian. Defenders of Yale dismissed any anti-Christian influences in the curriculum as matters of academic freedom and pointed to the extracurricular religious influences at the university. When William Sloan Coffin (’97), who chaired a special committee to answer Buckley, was a student, a broad character-oriented Protestantism held a respected place among Yale students and faculty. Going back to 1880, though, it was no longer possible for the Yale President to insist on Christian teaching, as President Noah Porter discovered in his efforts to restrict the teachings of Social Darwinist William Graham Sumner. Despite the imminent disappearance of explicit Christian influences in public culture, it was possible with the broadened definition of religion to see the situation as the spread of religious enlightenment.

Early Childhood Care in Sambas Muslim Family: Cultural and Religious Influences

This article reports an in-depth study on early childhood care in Sambas Malay Muslim family. This research incorporated a qualitative method with a descriptive approach through observations and interviews with parents and Sambas local figures. The findings indicate the influence of local culture and religious values on Sambas Muslim parenting style. More specifically, this study showed that parenting practices of Muslim Sambas Malay parents are carried out through the tradition of pantang larang and kemponan. Pantang larang and kemponan become parts of collective memory so that they become social educative traditions in early childhood care in the Muslim Sambas Malay family.

Nationalism and Religion in Comparative Perspective: A New Typology of National-Religious Configurations

Does religion motivate and intensify nationalism, or does religion moderate and even suppress nationalism? Six kinds of relationships between nationalism and religion are critically reviewed: nationalism as a modern religion in competition with traditional religions; religious origins of the “Chosen People” as the mythomoteur of nationalism; religious exclusion as nation-building; religious influences on national policies; influence of religious observance on national identification; and religiously based “civilizations” transcending nationalisms. Western Christian experience with nationalism is not generalizable due to the institutional autonomy and supranational organization of the Catholic Church. Western European nationalisms were premised on religious sectarian homogeneity, and the homogenous “confessional state” served as the template of European nation-states. Furthermore, I argue that the late medieval eradication of Muslims and Jews across Western Europe prefigured sectarian and ethnonational purges of the following centuries. Finally, I argue that different configurations of religion and nationalism depend on two critical conditions: the degree to which the dominant religious tradition is doctrinally supraethnic and institutionally transnational, and the religious identity of the main adversary in the constitutive conflict that culminated in national statehood. The crises of Marxism and liberalism provide the context for the resurgence of religion and nationalism at present.