https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9509299/

This study aimed to investigate the prevalence of religious coping and explore the association between religious coping, religiosity, and distress symptoms amongst 364 outpatients diagnosed with psychosis in Singapore. Positive and Negative Religious Coping (PRC and NRC), religiosity (measuring the constructs of Organised Religious Activity (ORA), Non-Organised Religious Activity (NORA), and Intrinsic Religiosity (IR)) and severity of distress symptoms (depression, anxiety and stress) were self-reported by the participants. The majority of participants (68.9%) reported religion to be important in coping with their illness. Additionally, multiple linear regression analyses found that NRC was significantly associated with higher symptoms of distress. In contrast, ORA was significantly associated with lower anxiety symptom scores. Overall, the study indicates the importance of religion in coping with psychosis and the potential value in incorporating religious interventions in mental health care. © 2022, The Author(s).

Based on historical research and ethnographic documentation, this article discusses the institutions, beliefs, and rituals of the sectarian religion the Zhenkongjiao in Malaysia and Singapore throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although the Zhenkongjiao originally rose to prominence as a result of its opium rehabilitation tenets, the organizations described in this article have long abandoned such a premise and have realigned themselves to contemporaneous needs. In this study, I challenge previous scholarship that historicized the Zhenkongjiao within convenient rise-and-fall mythemes by showing how the Zhenkongjiao’s leadership had been proactively situating itself within changing ontologies, epistemologies, and social needs throughout these two centuries. In particular, by comparing and contrasting the Zhenkongjiao’s approach to “science” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I shed light on the agency exercised by the supporters of a Chinese sectarian religion, who demonstrated maneuverability in reigniting and recontextualizing interest in their activities © 2022, Nanzan University. All rights reserved.

This book examines spirituality in Singapore, showing how important the city state is for understanding contemporary global configurations of urban space, religion, and spirituality. Joanne Punzo Waghorne highlights how the formal religious spaces-temples, churches, and mosques-have been confined to allotted sites on the map of Singapore, whereas various "spiritual" organizations, particularly of Hindu origins and headed by a guru, still continue to operate as "societies' classified by the government with other "clubs.' These unconventional religiosities are not confined but ironically make their own places, meeting in ostensive secular venues: high-rise flats, malls, businesses, and community centers, thus existing in the overall space of religion, commerce, and the state. The book argues that State of Singapore also operates between the secular and the religious, constructing an overarching spatial regime that both accommodates and yet rivals the alternate spheres that spiritual movements construct under its umbrella. Both spatial configurations challenge the presumed relationships between myth and reality, religion and commerce, the ethereal and the concrete, the sacred and the secular, on the levels of self, community, and polity. Singapore, now deemed a model for urban development in Asia, also offers an understanding of a new post-secularity and perhaps reveals where the urbanized world is headed.