Background: Researchers contend that religious and spiritual communities may provide a conduit to friendship for people with IDD. This research explored the interface between social networks and spirituality for individuals with IDD living in either a faith or non-faith based service. Method: A mixed-methods approach was used including…

Mualla Selçuk, Professor of Religious Education Faculty of Divinity & Director of Continuing Education Center Ankara University, begins by writing about the studies she conducted early in her career on the ways that the Quran addresses diversity. She describes how she found those passages that spoke of diversity among human beings as an…

Social support has been shown to be a significant protective factor in the lives of adolescents and has been linked to numerous health and psychological outcomes. Spirituality and religion have also been demonstrated to have similar effects on a host of outcomes. The current study further analyzed the link between these two constructs from a…

Because of the lack of support for Saudi female students in the United States and the lack of literature addressing social and academic challenges facing them, this qualitative study sought to fill the gap and answer the question of how studying abroad in the U.S. influences Saudi female students academically and socially. Since Saudi Arabia is an…

The limited research on adult learners and spiritual formation has created a knowledge gap regarding whether bachelor's degree-completion students value the faith aspects of their education at Christian colleges. As this population grows, so does the need to better understand if the spiritual components of adult programs are having an impact and…

A sample of 406 subjects completed a questionnaire testing the influence of personal spirituality, education and several other factors on sexual tension in cross-sex friendships (CSF Tension). The subjects included 143 students from a Christian university (CU), 137 from a secular junior college (JC), and 127 non-students (NS). The primary…

If spirituality is, among other things, a matter of "connectedness", then how do we nurture spirituality in adolescents with developmental disabilities who seem largely disconnected? This article advocates the practice of friendship as one important Christian model of spiritual connectedness that finds its origins in the initiative of God and…

Reading and discussing poetry with spiritual themes can play a major role in children's spiritual development. The communal, oral recitation of poetry has been a means of spiritual expression in many faith traditions. How would children respond to such a time-honoured oral group experience with poetry? What might it reveal about their…

Fisher's spiritual well-being (SWB) questionnaires assessed students' levels of relationship in four domains, namely with themselves, others, the environment and with a Transcendent Other (commonly called God). Students also reported the extent to which different entities helped them develop relationships in the four domains of SWB. However,…

The author analyses two award-winning juvenile novels, "Bridge to Terabithia" by Katherine Paterson and "Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy" by Gary Schmidt. Each novel portrays a deep friendship between a boy and girl who cross a stream (or river) into a world that includes fantasy, play, closeness to nature and animals, and a sense of the…

The experiences of Seventh-day Adventist students at secular universities was examined. Seven women and two men attending universities in Michigan and New York were interviewed. The researcher employed a heuristically guided phenomenological method to get rich descriptions of the participants' experiences in the secular university setting.…

This article explores how the concept of psychological well-being (PWB) relates to the religious and spiritual engagement of college students, as well as how levels of PWB vary between racial/ethnic groups over time during college. The study uses descriptive and multivariate analyses to examine PWB for White, Black, Latino/a, and Asian American…