Brian Malley

What do evangelicals believe when they 'believe in the Bible?' Despite hundreds of English versions that differ in their texts, evangelicals continue to believe that there is a stable text-'the Bible'-which is the authoritative word of God and an essential guide to their everyday lives. To understand this phenomenon of evangelical Biblicism, anthropologist and biblical scholar Brian Malley looks not to the words of the Bible but to the Bible-believing communities. For as Malley demonstrates, it is less the meaning of the words of the Bible itself than how 'the Bible' provides a proper ground for beliefs that matters to evangelicals. Drawing on recent cognitive and social theory and extensive fieldwork in an evangelical church, Malley's book is an invaluable guide for seminarians, social scientists of religion, or for anyone who wants to understand just how the Bible works for American evangelicals.

In this chapter, the reader will gain knowledge and practical skills about preparing raw clinical data for secondary statistical analysis.

INTRODUCTION: Whether red blood cell (RBC) transfusion is beneficial remains controversial. In both retrospective and prospective evaluations, transfusion has been associated with adverse, neutral, or protective effects. These varying results likely stem from a complex interplay between transfusion, patient characteristics, and clinical context. The objective was to test whether age, comorbidities, and clinical context modulate the effect of transfusion on survival. METHODS: By using the multiparameter intelligent monitoring in intensive care II database (v. 2.6), a retrospective analysis of 9,809 critically ill patients, we evaluated the effect of RBC transfusion on 30-day and 1-year mortality. Propensity score modeling and logistic regression adjusted for known confounding and assessed the independent effect of transfusion on 30-day and 1-year mortality. Sensitivity analysis was performed by using 3,164 transfused and non-transfused pairs, matched according the previously validated propensity model for RBC transfusion. RESULTS: RBC transfusion did not affect 30-day or 1-year mortality in the overall cohort. Patients younger than 55 years had increased odds of mortality (OR, 1.71; P < 0.01) with transfusion. Patients older than 75 years had lower odds of 30-day and 1-year mortality (OR, 0.70; P < 0.01) with transfusion. Transfusion was associated with worse outcome among patients undergoing cardiac surgery (OR, 2.1; P < 0.01). The propensity-matched population corroborated findings identified by regression adjustment. CONCLUSION: A complex relation exists between RBC transfusion and clinical outcome. Our results show that transfusion is associated with improved outcomes in some cohorts and worse outcome in others, depending on comorbidities and patient characteristics. As such, future investigations and clinical decisions evaluating the value of transfusion should account for variations in baseline characteristics and clinical context.

Can ritual form be predicted from knowledge of religious beliefs? E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley (Lawson &amp; McCauley 1990; McCauley &amp; Lawson 2002) have proposed a cognitive theory of religious ritual according to which the way in which superhuman agents are implicated in the ritual's action structure has consequences for the repeatability, reversibility, and relative sensory pageantry of the ritual in a religious system. We tested their predictions by systematic interviews of participants in the Hindu, Jewish, and Islamic traditions as represented on the campus of the University of Michigan. The Lawson-McCauley predictions were strongly supported by our findings, but our research also raised questions about the causal mechanism they propose, as few of our informants seemed to have clear ideas about the way in which superhuman agents were connected to their rituals.

The emerging cognitive psychology of religion: A review article BRIAN E. MALLEY Mind matters.' Emile Durkheim's postulate about the independence of the social from the psychological notwithstanding, recent anthropological thought has increasingly recognized the role of cognition in organizing cultural phe- nomena. Religious phenomena figure prominently in cognitive anthropolog- ical discussions, because religion, in several ways, is a limiting case for anthropological theory. As a result, a considerable body of cognitive theory has developed around religion, and recent years have witnessed the emer- gence of a distinctly cognitive psychology of religion. In this essay I shall survey the cognitive scientific