Disaggregating conservative Protestant groups in Northern Ireland: Overlapping categories and the importance of a born-again self-identification

Rather than treating conservative Protestantism as a homogenous phenomenon, recent literature has underlined the importance of disaggregating this group to illuminate important attitudinal and behavioral differences between conservative Protestants. However, the methods used to empirically operationalize conservative Protestantism have not always been able to capture variations within the groupings. Based on analysis of the 2004 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, we argue that religious self-identification is a more useful way of analyzing conservative Protestant subgroups than denomination or religious belief. We show that many of these identifications are overlapping, rather than stand-alone, religious group identifications. Moreover, the identification category of born-again has seldom been included in surveys. We find having a born-again identification to be a better predictor than the more frequently asked fundamentalist and evangelical categories of the religious and social beliefs that are seen as indicative of conservative Protestantism.

Strategy in a religious network: A bourdieuian critique of the sociology of spirituality

Within the sociology of religion there has emerged a discourse on spirituality that views contemporary developments as involving the assertion of individuals’ self-authority. This perspective’s theoretical roots have been persistently criticised for their conceptualisation of agency; in contrast, this paper draws upon Bourdieu’s concept of strategy to examine action in an English religious network of the sort often classified ‘New Age’. In particular, one informant is discussed in order to provide focus for an understanding of what Lahire calls sociology at the level of the individual. Her actions, better explained as strategic improvisations than as choices made on the basis of self-authority, help to illuminate the peculiarities of this religious setting, which is characterised in terms of ‘nonformativeness’. By emphasising social contextualisation, this approach addresses people’s meaningful actions in a way that may be applied not only more widely within the religious field but also in other fields of action.

The Challenges of Universalising Religions: the Kabbalah Centre in France and Britain.

The Kabbalah Centre is an offshoot of Judaism which since the 1990s has spread kabbalistic teaching in several countries to a religiously diverse audience. This article compares two European branches of the Kabbalah Centre: the flourishing London Centre, and the Parisian Centre that declined in the late 1990s before closing its doors in 2005. It emphasizes in particular the responses they stirred from the media, anticult movements, Orthodox Judaism and the Jewish population. Ultimately, this case study allows us to observe, in situ, the trajectory of a global religion, torn between its Jewish roots and universalistic ambitions. It emphasizes the importance, in this process, of the relationship it maintains, willingly or not, with its original religious frame. Consequently, the importance of local contexts is raised, illustrating the impact and combination of diverse factors. In addition to public and official responses to religious diversity, religious movements are affected by the religious landscape and the structures and authorities of religious organizations, as well as the religious and cultural characteristics of the population. Ultimately, this article underscores the complexity of the globalization of religion, which embraces a wide range of complex, sometimes ambiguous, situations lying between strong particularistic identity-claims and cosmopolitan, universalistic ambitions.

Influence of the Graphical Levels of Detail of a Virtual Thrower on the Perception of the Movement

Virtual reality has a number of advantages for analyzing sports interactions such as the standardization of experimental conditions, stereoscopic vision, and complete control of animated humanoid movement. Nevertheless, in order to be useful for sports applications, accurate perception of simulated movement in the virtual sports environment is essential. This perception depends on parameters of the synthetic character such as the number of degrees of freedom of its skeleton or the levels of detail (LOD) of its graphical representation. This study focuses on the influence of this latter parameter on the perception of the movement. In order to evaluate it, this study analyzes the judgments of immersed handball goalkeepers that play against a graphically modified virtual thrower. Five graphical representations of the throwing action were defined: a textured reference level (L0), a nontextured level (L1), a wire-frame level (L2), a moving point light display (MLD) level with a normal-sized ball (L3), and a MLD level where the ball is represented by a point of light (L4). The results show that judgments made by goalkeepers in the L4 condition are significantly less accurate than in all the other conditions (p

Non-locality of two ultracold trapped atoms

We undertake a detailed analysis of the non-local properties of the fundamental problem of two trapped, distinguishable neutral atoms that interact with a short-range potential characterized by an s-wave scattering length. We show that this interaction generates continuous variable (CV) entanglement between the external degrees of freedom of the atoms and consider its behaviour as a function of both, the distance between the traps and the magnitude of the inter-particle scattering length. We first quantify the entanglement in the ground state of the system at zero temperature and then, adopting a phase-space approach, test the violation of the Clauser-Horn-Shimony-Holt inequality at zero and non-zero temperature and under the effects of general dissipative local environments.

Scattering theory of cooling and heating in optomechanical systems

We present a one-dimensional scattering theory which enables us to describe a wealth of effects arising from the coupling of the motional degree of freedom of scatterers to the electromagnetic field. Multiple scattering to all orders is taken into account. The theory is applied to describe the scheme of a Fabry-Perot resonator with one of its mirrors moving. The friction force, as well as the diffusion, acting on the moving mirror is derived. In the limit of a small reflection coefficient, the same model provides for the description of the mechanical effect of light on an atom moving in front of a mirror.

The Importance of Religious Displays for Belief Acquisition and Secularization

Both the sociology and the cognitive science of religion seek to explain the acquisition of religious beliefs. In this article, I offer an account of the acquisition and distribution of religious beliefs using the findings of both fields. In the process, I seek to illustrate the potential of interdisciplinary dialogue for improving our understanding of religion and its absence. More specifically, I present a prima facie case—based on existing work in the social and cognitive sciences, exploratory online surveys, and participant observation—that witnessing actions attesting to religious claims is one of the most crucial variables determining whether or not an individual will explicitly believe such claims. Further, I argue that the connection between action and belief can help produce an improved account of secularization and non-theism, defined here as the lack of explicit belief in the existence of non-physical agents.

The Science of Religious Beliefs

Why have humans, throughout history and across cultures, shown a strong tendency to believe in the existence of superhuman intentional agents and attached this belief to notions of morality, misfortune, and the creation of the world? The answer emerging from the cognitive science of religion appears to be that explicit beliefs are informed and constrained by the natural and cross-culturally recurrent operation of implicit cognitive systems. Successful god concepts resonate with the expectations of these implicit systems but also have attention-demanding and inferentially-rich properties that allow their integration into various areas of human concern. Theological concepts may deviate from these natural cognitive moorings but require special cultural scaffolding, such as Whitehouse's two Modes of Religiosity, to do so and constitute additions to, rather than replacements of the religious beliefs supported by implicit cognitive systems.