Search Results (357)

This article analyses female genital mutilation (FGM) from an interdisciplinary perspective, with particular attention to its identity-related dimension and to the interaction between culture, religion, exclusion, and legal responses to violence against women. The study examines the evolution of its treatment and public perception, from the relative invisibility characteristic of early anthropological approaches within Western public and political agendas to its progressive recognition as an extreme form of gender-based violence. Methodologically, it is based on a documentary and comparative analysis of normative instruments, institutional reports, and specialised academic literature. As a specific contribution, the article develops the category of “absolute or totalising otherness” to explain identity-based exclusion and the particular vulnerability of women and girls simultaneously exposed to forms of exclusion based on sex, culture, race, religion, and migration status. The analysis identifies several barriers to eradication, including the lack of comparable data capable of assessing its actual prevalence, proposals advocating the medicalisation of FGM as a purported lesser evil, and dynamics of exclusion in host countries that may reinforce reactive identities and re-signify the value of identity-based rites of passage. The findings further suggest that the persistence of FGM depends not only on these factors, but also on the narratives that sustain or challenge the practice, within which religious discourse acquires particular significance. However, the position adopted by religious spokespersons, leaders, and institutions remains ambivalent: they may provide an argument or alibi that sacralises the rite or, conversely, serve to challenge the false belief that it constitutes a religious mandate, thereby excluding the practice from the moral and religious order. Full article

Background: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially sensitive contexts, raising concerns about how their outputs reflect or reproduce socially aversive response patterns. Prior research has focused on socially desirable traits (e.g., the Big Five), while less attention has been given to the Dark Triad—Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. Methods: This exploratory study applies a psychometric probing approach using the Short Dark Triad (SD3) as a structured questionnaire to analyze response patterns in 12 LLMs. Through controlled persona prompting (gender, age, religion), more than 540,000 responses were generated across model–persona–item observations. Outputs were scored using standard psychometric procedures and compared with pooled human SD3 reference values using Hedges’ g as an interpretive benchmark. Results: Across models, Machiavellianism-related scores tend to be lower than human references, narcissism-related scores slightly higher, and psychopathy-related scores largely within the human range. Persona prompting produces systematic but uneven effects: gender has minimal impact, age yields small shifts, and religious framing leads to the strongest and most consistent decreases in socially aversive response patterns. However, observed differences showed notable heterogeneity across models. Conclusions: The findings should be understood as response patterns shaped by context and specific prompting conditions. Our findings suggest that persona effects reflect normative activation, not identity simulation. Persona prompts seem to trigger patterns in the training data rather than consistent, identity-specific traits. Overall, the study highlights both the potential and limitations of psychometric-style probing for evaluating LLM behavior and underscores the importance of prompt context in shaping model outputs. Full article

Background: Gender dysphoria denotes the psychological distress experienced by individuals due to the incongruence between their gender identity and their sex assigned at birth. Gender-affirming surgery (GAS) is one of the treatment options available for people with gender dysphoria. This study aims to identify and analyze all ethical reasons both supporting and opposing GAS as a treatment option for gender dysphoria in adults. Methodology: A systematic review of reasons was conducted in accordance with the methodology proposed by Strech and Sofaer (2012) and the PRISMA guidelines. The literature search was conducted in seven major online databases—PubMed, Scopus, Embase, Web of Science, Philosopher’s Index, ATLA Religion, and Index Theologicus—and in the Google Scholar search engine. Results: Twenty-nine articles published between 2003 and 2024 met the inclusion criteria. The ethical reasons identified in the included literature were grouped into five thematic categories: (1) the origin and nature of gender dysphoria, (2) reasons related to GAS as a treatment for gender dysphoria, (3) anthropological reasons, (4) reasons related to the effects of GAS, and (5) reasons stemming from traditional ethical principles. Discussion: The wide range of ethical reasons both supporting and opposing GAS as a treatment option for gender dysphoria in adults highlights the complexity of ethical deliberation in this area. This review provides a structured overview of the ethical reasons discussed in the literature, identifies important gaps, and suggests directions for future research. Full article

This article addresses the underrepresentation of religion in historical accounts of apartheid’s gendered political economy. It asks how colonial missionary discourse and apartheid law interacted in constructing and regulating Black womanhood, and how intersectionality and Bosadi hermeneutics can expose and contest the theological legitimation of Black women’s labour, sacrifice, and endurance. The study uses a qualitative historical-theological and contextual biblical method. It analyses selected historical scholarship, South African legislation, the Constitutional Court’s Mahlangu judgment, and Proverbs 31:10–31 and Ruth, through the lens of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality and Madipoane Masenya’s Bosadi hermeneutics. The analysis finds that mission Christianity and the apartheid state were neither identical nor uniform, but influential Christian ideals of domesticity, respectability, service, and feminine sacrifice could converge with a racialised system that restricted African women’s land, mobility, residence, labour, and family life. Proverbs 31 and Ruth are therefore treated as contested resources: they can affirm women’s agency and economic intelligence, but they can also be appropriated to moralise overwork and precarious survival. The article contributes an integrated historical-theological account that links law, labour, religion, and biblical reception without reducing African women to passive victims. It recommends that churches and theological institutions audit the distribution of labour and authority, support decent work and shared care, and interpret biblical texts with women whose lives are shaped by racialised and gendered inequality. Full article

African immigrant men in the United Kingdom (UK) experience forms of suffering that transcend both the clinical framework of acculturation stress and the political narrative of racial victimhood. Existing scholarship frequently overlooks how race, religion, and gender historically entangle to construct diasporic identities. This paper investigates how African immigrant men in the UK navigate the constitutive forces of race, gender, and religion in constructing and resisting diasporic identities. The paper develops “Ntu Fracture” as a theological–anthropological framework to diagnose the wounding of diasporic masculine personhood at the level of vital relationality. The framework draws upon Bantu philosophy (Ntu, ubuntu) and Yoruba cosmology (àṣẹ), placing them in critical dialogue with Fanon’s sociogeny and Butler’s concept of precarity. Utilising a qualitative desktop methodology, the findings suggest a fractured subjectivity among African men in the UK driven by three main mechanisms: (1) institutional racism as recognition-severing, (2) immigration enforcement as obligation-interruption and (3) parenting surveillance as domestic colonisation. The paper concludes that the lived experiences of African religious communities within the UK’s hostile environment stem from historical constructions of race, religion, and gender, categories experienced as unified entities that collapse conventional distinctions between the sacred and the secular. Full article

Contemporary cinema increasingly portrays believing women as active moral agents rather than passive figures confined by patriarchal or religious stereotypes. However, scholarship on religion and film has predominantly focused on male religious figures, leaving the representation of believing women comparatively underexplored, especially in films directed by women in the twenty-first century. This paper addresses this gap by examining how female agency, religious identity, and peacebuilding are represented in three contemporary films directed by women: Wadjda (2012, Saudi Arabia), God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya (2019, North Macedonia), and Women Talking (2022, USA). These films were selected because, despite originating from distinct religious and cultural contexts—Islam, Orthodox Christianity, and Protestant Mennonite tradition—they share female protagonists who negotiate patriarchal religious structures through nonviolent, relational strategies of action. Drawing on feminist film theory and the distinction between negative and positive peace, the analysis demonstrates that these protagonists move beyond stereotypical portrayals of religious women as passive or marginalized, instead enacting agency through persistence, dialogue, solidarity, and nonviolent resistance. The paper argues that contemporary women-directed cinema can function as a space for reimagining women’s religious identities and for articulating more inclusive, peace-oriented models of social transformation. Full article

Identity development is a central developmental task during emerging adulthood, and religiosity has been proposed as an important factor associated with this process. However, empirical evidence from the Indian context remains limited. This cross-sectional study examined the association between religiosity and positive self-identity among 2137 university students recruited from multiple institutions across India. Data were collected using a self-administered electronic questionnaire completed during scheduled classroom sessions. Pearson’s correlation and multiple linear regression analyses were performed, with the latter adjusted for socio-demographic characteristics. Religiosity showed a significant positive correlation with positive self-identity (r = 0.390, p < 0.001). Regression analysis revealed that after adjusting for covariates (age, gender, religion, family income, and place of birth), religiosity remained a significant independent predictor of positive self-identity (β = 0.348, p < 0.001). These findings indicate that higher religiosity is independently associated with greater positive self-identity, encompassing higher self-confidence, self-esteem, self-satisfaction, ease of self-definition, and inner peace, among Indian university students. The study contributes context-specific evidence on the role of religiosity in positive identity development within the Indian socio-cultural setting. Full article

Since the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and South Korea in 1992, research on Korean Buddhism in mainland China has undergone more than three decades of accumulation and has developed a relatively comprehensive research framework; its methodological characteristics, however, have not yet been subjected to systematic examination. This article offers a historiographical and methodological evaluation of that field rather than a systematic bibliometric review. Drawing principally on Chinese-language literature from the CNKI database, supplemented by Korean-language publications from the RISS and KCI databases, it examines journal articles, theses, monographs, and edited conference volumes published between 1992 and 2025, selecting individual works for detailed discussion according to their scholarly influence, thematic coverage, and methodological significance. Using contemporaneous scholarship from the Korean academic community as an external point of reference, it conducts a cross-linguistic evaluation of the developmental trajectory of the field. The findings indicate that this field has made distinctive contributions in the excavation of Chinese-language historical sources, the construction of the history of bilateral exchanges, and the study of state–monastic relations. At the same time, the long-standing absence of substantive dialogue with Korean academia, the overall lack of research on material religion, and the systematic neglect of gender perspectives constitute major bottlenecks constraining its further development. Through methodological refinement and the institutional construction of Sino–Korean academic reciprocity, this field may transcend a purely bilateral framework and offer original contributions to the study of comparative religious history in East Asia, as well as to a broader comparative programme encompassing other scholarly traditions. Full article

This essay discusses feminist ideas in connection to the occulture—Christopher Partridge’s term for the re-enchantment of art, popular culture, and everyday life through esoteric and spiritual currents—present in opera, musical theater, and film, focusing on femmes fatales, tricksters and ‘wicked women’ in a transcultural approach to religion, (Western) esotericism, and the performing arts. The spiritual–scientific embodiment of Afro-Brazilian traditions is explored through the figure of Pombagira—a Brazilian occultural creation of a female enchantress with mystical powers connected to healing and sex, often placed in patriarchal opposition to her male counterpart, Exu. Drawing on Partridge’s notions of occulture and Walter Mignolo’s understanding of decoloniality, the Western gendering imposed on Pombagira as a purveyor of evil is discussed as both mythology and potential epistemicide. The thesis statement presented here is that the Pombagira episteme is an underlying emblem throughout art and scholarship invested in queering essential binary categories of womanhood, as seen in staged adaptations of Verdi’s La forza del destino (1862), Bizet’s Carmen (1875), and numerous cinematic Lola incarnations—Marlene Dietrich’s in Der blaue Engel (1930), Gwen Verdon’s in Damn Yankees (1958), and Almodóvar’s in Todo sobre mi madre (1999). This indisciplinary reading connects Gloria Anzaldúa’s queer feminist practice of spiritual mestizaje with the Pombagira as an occultural anti-patriarchal force. Full article

The Constitutional Court of South Africa issued a landmark verdict permitting men to adopt a woman’s surname, marking a significant advancement for gender equality and identity. ATR and Christian theology were premised on the same connecting principle: the transmission of authority through male inheritance, as signified by shared surnames that marked belonging across generations within social hierarchies. This study is positioned within the South African constitutional, cultural, and theological framework, which contextualises patriarchal naming norms as profoundly ingrained in both religious and customary systems. An interdisciplinary qualitative methodology was utilised, integrating constitutional jurisprudence with theological contemplation and the study of African Traditional Religion through critical textual analysis of court rulings and naming conventions. The verdict affirmed constitutional principles of equality and dignity against established patriarchal constraints on lineage and identity, revealing progressive aspects within both traditions that may be utilised for more inclusive interpretations of identity. The verdict represented a legal progression as well as a cultural and spiritual intervention; the decision prompted contemplation on nomenclature, identity, and gender justice within religious traditions. This study illustrates that constitutional law might stimulate theological renewal and reinterpretation of African Traditional Religion concerning gender equality through an interdisciplinary communication between the two domains. Full article

This article theorises Hmong migration through the concept of resettled histories, understood as the social and political processes through which histories of war, flight, loss, survival, and belonging are carried into new places, translated into new institutional languages, and contested across generations. Rather than approaching Hmong mobility as a linear movement from Southeast Asia to Western resettlement countries, the article situates Hmong migrations within longer histories of upland mobility, imperial and colonial governance, Cold War militarisation, refugee camps, and contemporary diasporic reconstruction. In response to scholarship on collective memory, postmemory, diasporic memory, refugee critique, digital diaspora, and Asian American studies, the article clarifies that resettled histories are not simply memories preserved after migration. They are histories that become socially active after resettlement through community organisations, veteran memorialisation, Hmong New Year celebrations, oral-history projects, clan networks, digital platforms, political mobilisation, and intergenerational debate. The article also foregrounds differences among Hmong communities by gender, generation, religion, class, political position, national location, and relations to Laos, China, Thailand, France, Australia, and the United States. By engaging contemporary Hmong scholarship and Hmong-produced archives alongside foundational migration and memory theory, the article shows how displaced communities do not merely adapt to host societies; they also struggle to have their histories recognised, narrated, and transmitted. The Hmong case demonstrates that resettlement may provide legal security without ending the historical life of displacement. It therefore offers a lens for rethinking migration as the movement and reconstruction of histories, not only the movement of people. Full article

Encounters between Africa and Europe have occurred since ancient times, yet a decisive turn in these relations occurred during the height of European imperial and colonial expansionist explorations from the 15th century. The central question behind this article is how did Europe succeed in emasculating Africans and Africa? Through a multi-focal analysis combining systems-thinking and intersectionality approaches to analyzing these encounters, this article makes the following findings—Europe constructed an asymmetrical relationship in which race, gender, religion, and class were instrumentalized and weaponized, erasing or blurring the distinctions between the sacred and the secular to achieve the total domination and control of Africans while assuring themselves of access to all African resources. Full article

This study examines how religious socialization unfolds within a multi-religious academic campus, focusing on Palestinian–Muslim female students studying in a Jewish-majority institution in Israel. While academic spaces are often framed as secular and neutral, this research investigates how religion continues to shape identity, belonging, and everyday interactions in such contexts. Drawing on an interpretive qualitative approach, the study is based on in-depth interviews with 28 Palestinian–Muslim female graduate students. The findings reveal that the campus functions as a post-secular space characterized by three interconnected dynamics: (1) institutional arrangements that privilege majority religious norms while marginalizing minority practices; (2) the reproduction of power relations and symbolic boundaries between Jewish and Muslim students; and (3) subtle yet significant processes of identity transformation emerging through interreligious encounters. The study shows that religious socialization extends beyond family and community, taking shape within institutional contexts that require ongoing negotiation of visibility, legitimacy, and belonging. It further highlights forms of agency expressed through strategic adaptation, selective participation, and everyday resistance under conditions of constraint. These findings contribute to post-secular theory by demonstrating how religion is reconfigured rather than diminished in contemporary academic institutions, and position higher education as a critical site for understanding religion, gender, and power in divided societies. Full article

Background/Objectives: Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination is an important cancer prevention strategy, yet uptake remains incomplete. Although provider recommendation is a key driver of HPV vaccination, less is known about how future physicians’ own vaccination behaviors are shaped. This study examined whether family vaccination context was associated with HPV vaccine uptake among medical students, with attention to implications for future vaccine counseling and prevention training. Materials and Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of survey data from 230 medical students at Wayne State University School of Medicine. The primary outcome was self-reported HPV vaccination status, dichotomized as fully vaccinated versus not fully vaccinated or unsure. Predictors included family vaccination context, gender, religious affiliation, age, year in medical school, prior HPV education, HPV knowledge, and HPV stigma. Family vaccination context was modeled as an ordinal predictor based on agreement that family members of age were vaccinated. HPV knowledge was modeled using a 22-item baseline pre-survey composite score. HPV stigma was modeled as a 2-item composite assessing perceived stigma associated with HPV and disclosure. Analyses included univariate and bivariate tests, followed by complete-case multivariable logistic regression. A sensitivity analysis restricted the outcome to vaccinated versus unvaccinated students, excluding those who were unsure. Results: Of 230 students, 189 (82.2%) reported being fully vaccinated against HPV. In bivariate analyses, family vaccination context, gender, and HPV knowledge were associated with vaccination status, whereas religion, age, year in medical school, prior HPV education, and HPV stigma were not. In the adjusted model (n = 165), family vaccination context remained the strongest independent correlate of HPV vaccination status (OR, 3.95; 95% CI, 2.11–7.42; p < 0.001). Female gender was also associated with higher odds of vaccination (OR, 3.80; 95% CI, 1.01–14.29; p = 0.048), as was higher HPV knowledge (OR, 1.26; 95% CI, 1.03–1.53; p = 0.024). HPV stigma showed a borderline inverse association with vaccination status (OR, 0.53; 95% CI, 0.26–1.07; p = 0.076). Religion, age, year in medical school, and prior HPV education were not statistically significant after adjustment. The family vaccination association remained robust in the vaccinated-versus-unvaccinated sensitivity analysis (OR, 7.70; 95% CI, 2.45–24.26; p < 0.001). Exploratory secondary analyses suggested that family vaccination context may also be associated with stronger intention to recommend HPV vaccination to future patients and greater intent to vaccinate among students who were not fully vaccinated or unsure, although these findings should be interpreted cautiously. Conclusions: Perceived family vaccination context was the strongest and most consistent correlate of self-reported HPV vaccine completion among medical students in this cross-sectional study. Gender and HPV knowledge were also associated with vaccination status in the primary adjusted model, although these estimates were less precise and less consistent across model specifications. Findings should be interpreted as associations rather than causal effects. HPV prevention training may benefit from addressing not only factual knowledge, but also trainees’ vaccination histories, perceived family and social norms, HPV-related stigma, and comfort discussing vaccination as part of preparation for future cancer prevention counseling. Full article

This study examines the schooling experiences of transgender students in Malta within the broader historical and sociocultural influence of the Catholic religion, focusing on how religious discourse shapes processes of inclusion and exclusion. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with transgender students, parents, educators, and school administrators, the findings reveal that Catholic doctrine and its presence within school contexts contribute to the erasure of transgender identities from early childhood onward. In contrast to ecclesiastical narratives that frame transgender identity as a form of “gender ideology,” participants’ accounts demonstrate that social and medical transitions function as critical strategies for survival, well-being, and self-recognition. Methodologically, the study employs qualitative thematic analysis informed by a critical anticolonial framework, enabling an interrogation of how religious authority intersects with colonial legacies to regulate gender and embodiment. The analysis further highlights tensions between the Catholic religion and contemporary human rights and ethical frameworks, particularly in relation to inclusion. The study concludes that if the Catholic religion is to retain relevance within school contexts, it must undergo a substantive ethical reorientation toward inclusivity, recognizing transgender embodiment and agency. In line with emancipatory pedagogical traditions, this entails reimagining the role of the Catholic religion as one that actively supports social justice, critical consciousness, and transformative practices of inclusion. Full article