Several recent works have addressed the issue of the origin of religion. Some have linked this occurrence to evolutionary mechanisms, others to sociological processes, and still others to psychological functions. Each position has interest and sheds a different light on a necessarily complex process. The paper examines several of these theories and offers a synthetic perspective which integrates psychological, sociological, evolutionary, and theological concepts in a new manner.

As evidenced by this conference, the intersections between religion and information are beginning to be recognized and explored. However, the literature on information seeking and religion has tended to focus on the information behavior of religious leaders (see Michels, 2009, 2012; Roland, 2007; Roland & Wicks, 2009; Wicks, 1999). Several papers from the previous two CSIR Conferences on Information and Religion focus on information seeking, use and evaluation, but the emphasis continues to be placed on examining these topics from an historical or clergy-centered perspective.

This paper offers an alternative approach to the study of information and religion by exploring information seeking practices in the context of religious conversion. Based on a search for peer-reviewed articles and conference proceedings in the major library and information science (LIS), religious studies, anthropology, and sociology databases, this paper includes what Marcia J. Bates has called a “rigorous systematic bibliography” (1976). I identify ways in which the concept of information seeking in the religious conversion process has been presented in the literature under subject terms, in combination with keyword searching. Using this method, I draw attention to the presence of information and information seeking in the existing literature on religious conversion.

By highlighting the ways in which these articles illustrate the concept of information seeking in the process of religious conversion, I develop a thorough definition of religious conversion and discuss its implications for our discipline’s understanding of “the social construction of religious knowledge” – the theme of this year’s Conference on Information and Religion. My findings build upon Jarkko Kari’s work on spiritual information phenomena (Kari 2011, 2009, 2007, 2001; Kari & Hartel 2007), and will further contribute to scholarly knowledge about information practices in religious contexts.

The missiological strategies developed in the Middle Ages by the adherents of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity were centripetal in approach, drawing persons inward to a central structure. Multiplex institutions—kahals, zawiyas and monasteries—were constructed as outposts for the spread and/or maintenance of these religions’ respective beliefs and practices. In addition to the standard religious structures were collections of religious documents – libraries, in other words – that served as repositories for both Scriptures and other spiritually-oriented information. Those who made use of such collections added to them and in their comprehensive form they served as resource material for the education of successive generations. In this essay the origins and histories of the Jewish kahals, the Muslim zawiyas and the Christian monasteries will be explored with particular attention paid to the role played by the document collections in each. The authors will show how these institutions operated on the basis of a combination of both centripetalism (i.e. “coming in to a center”) and centrifugalism (i.e. “going out from a center”). The Muslim zawiyas and the Christian monasteries were intentionally spread throughout their respective regions as “missionary outposts.” The Jewish kahals were spread less intentionally but served in certain cases as “advertisements” for Judaism. All three institutions played vital roles in shaping, maintaining and spreading their respective religious beliefs and practices, and their equivalents can still do so in the present day.

In Information Science studies, the Data/Information/Knowledge/Wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy is a conventional construct for making sense of the terms. However, when examined with any rigor, the distinctions become challenged and the hierarchy appears to fail. I suggest that the reason for this is the tacit classification of this hierarchy as a disciplinary ontological narrative. With context-appropriate definitions and delimitations, the DIKW hierarchy can still be useful as a model for specific applications in information literacy pedagogy. This is illustrated in the context of theological education by using the construct to differentiate the identification of primary sources in the Seminary disciplines.

Keywords: information literacy, research methods, primary sources, critical thinking, discernment, DIKW

This paper examines the intersection of religion and information delivery in the early 1970s, specifically regarding how Christian denominations reacted to the Watergate Scandal during Richard M. Nixon’s presidency. As church bodies determined to voice their opinions about the controversy swirling in the American political system, they first grappled with how best to communicate to a large audience, which included first, their lay constituencies, next their leadership networks and clergy, and finally the larger American public. Understanding how they engaged in this communication at that time can assist scholars today who study the past and want to examine it as accurately and thoroughly as possible.

The social context of religious knowledge includes many different aspects of an individual’s life, including the external structures, such as class and political environment, which influence social behavior and the social processes, such as attitudes and values, which provide a level of consistency in people’s viewpoints, including the way that they encounter, react to, and attempt to incorporate new knowledge. This study examines the relationships between specific expressed religious views and opinions about specific scientific issues. The data used for the study is based on a representative random sample of Americans in the 2010 General Social Survey (GSS) conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). The scientific issues examined are: global climate change, evolution, stem cell research, continental drift/age of the earth, the big bang, and nanotechnology. The religious attitudes examined are based on questions about: belief in God, “born again” experience, extent of religious feelings, religious commitment, Bible reading, and whether God should punish sinners. Chi square and correlation statistical tests were used to explore the relationships between the religion and science variables, leading to rejection of the hypothesis that there are no differences in the attitudes of those with positive attitudes about religion and those with little, none or even negative religious attitudes and their attitudes towards the specific scientific issues included in the study. Analysis revealed inverse relationships between strong, positive religious attitudes and strong positive attitudes about current scientific issues.

In a text-based discovery and analytical environment, high quality textual representation is needed to support discovery of and research on spoken content. The increased representation of human thoughts and ideas as digitally represented speech highlights the need for efficient generation of high quality text representations of spoken content. The most cost-effective method of producing textual representations is speech recognition systems. While much progress has been made in speaker-dependent (e.g., speaker trained) speech recognition systems, they produce poor quality results when applied in domain agnostic and speaker independent contexts (e.g., digitally recorded spoken content posted to the web). Results generated by domain-agnostic and speaker-independent language models are not usable for discovery or analysis. The poor quality results are due in part to the misalignment of domain-specific vocabularies and the domain-agnostic dictionaries used for acoustic pattern matching in speech recognition systems. The field of speech recognition is complex. Language models comprise only one of the four major components of speech recognition systems. Current speech recognition systems use language models which typically represent a non-domain specific vocabulary of 1,000 words. This is considered to be a large language space in speech recognition systems. This paper reports on exploratory research designed to test quality improvements that may be achieved by developing domain-focused phonemic vocabularies. The research relies on human knowledge engineering methods to model domain-specific languages. The research leverages the Atlas.ti application to extract and model religious language. The Logios application is used to convert the text vocabulary of 25,000 words to phonemic representation. The research focuses on digitally recorded spoken religious sermons as the test corpus.

The current research study investigated factors associated with spiritual development among adolescents. Eighty five participants (12 – 19 years) attending Protestant church youth groups were asked to complete a questionnaire measuring spiritual transformation, identity, and maturity as well as demographics, personality, religious social support, and personal devotional activities. The purpose of this research was to understand how religious social support (family, friends, church, mentorship) and personal devotional activities (prayer, worship, study of sacred texts) were related to a spiritual transformation experience, spiritual identity, and spiritual maturity. It was hypothesized that adolescents who reported having had a positive spiritual transformation and who demonstrated higher levels of spiritual identity and maturity would be more connected to religious support systems and would engage more in personal devotional activities. These hypotheses were supported. In particular, those who reported stronger levels of spiritual identity were more actively engaged in prayer, worship, and study of sacred texts and had more religious support from friends, parents, church, and mentorship. Youth who had higher levels of spiritual identity also reported a desire both to be mentored and to mentor others. Active engagement in a greater religious community was related to having had a spiritual transformation experience. These findings may enable mental health professionals, religious leaders, and parents to better understand how to support adolescents with religious and spiritual interests in their journey of spiritual development.

Keywords: spirituality, religiosity, adolescents, parents, mentor, worship, prayer

A clash of cultures exists between the world of the rabbi and the mass media environment given that the rabbi emerges from a conservative culture representing established traditions and religious structures, and is confronted with accelerated cultural change exemplified by the media. To be true, the synagogue has for hundreds of years been losing its monopoly of strengthening moral values. If religion in traditional societies was based upon authority vested in religious bodies, in complex industrial societies there is increased emphasis upon personal choice in moral and religious matters with religious and spiritual issues increasingly mediated through print and electronic technologies. Mass media has in effect become a secondary causal agent of contemporary religious identity.

Iranian traditional architecture is one of the world's architectures par excellence. It was one of the most important architectures in the medieval Islamic world. Iranian architecture has developed over millennia in response to its religion. Many traditional and vernacular buildings in Iran show that the architects had been so clever in harmonizing the Iranian religion and architecture in the past. The architects know how to adapt architecture to Iran's conditions. From 1900 to now, thousands of new homes, apartment units and buildings have been constructed in Iran. In particular, the Iranian cities have expanded enormously and their great old structures are complemented by massive new urban developments. Learning from traditional architecture always can help us to take lessons on the Iranian beliefs directly from the past without extra expenditure.

This article will explain the impacts of Iranian religions (Zoroastrian and Islam) on its architecture, and the major focus of the paper is to introduce how Iranian architecture has been influenced by the religion. It will analyze the Iranian architecture in the past and will show how the Iranian architecture was in harmony with Iranian religion, as well as its ideology. Then it will demonstrate in detail how its new planning solutions have failed to continue the thoughts of the past.

Moreover, to better understand the role and relations of architecture and identity, this paper attempts to discover the changes of Iranian architecture through the last century. The results provide an effective strategy for future planning of Iranian cities.

To accomplish this purpose, this paper is organized as follows: after the introductory part, the Iranian architecture is introduced in Section II, followed by the explanation of the changes of its architecture in section III. Study results are presented in Section IV and finally the conclusions will be addressed in section V.