The attitudes of 44 occupational therapists on the place of spirituality within palliative care were investigated. Their responses to a postal questionnaire indicated that spirituality was an important part of life for 35 (80%) respondents, helped 33 (75%) respondents with daily job responsibilities and was viewed as an important dimension of health and rehabilitation by 39 (89%) respondents. Spiritual issues were considered to be within the scope of occupational therapy by 33 (75%) respondents. However, only 8 (18%) respondents stated that they consistently addressed spirituality within assessment. The respondents described several activities that addressed clients' spirituality, including open-ended discussion, facilitation of activities of daily living that contribute to maximising quality of life and creative activities. Thirty-two (73%) respondents considered that their education had not prepared them to deal with clients' spiritual needs and 28 (64%) wanted further training in spiritual care. It is proposed that there is a need for further research and refinement of the conceptual understanding of spirituality in order to provide a firm framework for its inclusion in occupational therapy.

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Research has found that intergenerational transmission of religiosity results in higher family functioning and improved family relationships. Yet the Pew Research Center found that 44% of Americans reported that they had left the religious affiliation of their childhood. And 78% of the expanding group of those who identify as religiously unaffiliated (“Nones”) reported that they were raised in “highly religious families.” We suggest that this may be, in part, associated with religious parents exercising excessive firmness with inadequate flexibility (rigidity). We used a multiphase, systematic, team-based process to code 8000+ pages of in-depth interviews from 198 Christian, Jewish, and Muslim families from 17 states in all 8 major religio-cultural regions of the United States. We framed firmness as mainly about loyalty to God and God’s purposes, and flexibility as mainly about loyalty to family members and their needs and circumstances. The reported findings provided a range of examples illustrating (a) religious firmness, (b) religious flexibility, as well as (c) efforts to balance and combine firmness and flexibility. We discuss conceptual and practical implications of treating firmness and flexibility as complementary loyalties in intergenerational faith transmission.

Islam is a major world religion and the Muslim population is one of the fastest growing religious populations in the Western world, including in the United States. However, few research studies have examined the lived religious experience of U.S. Muslim families. Much of the attention on Islam among researchers and the media tends to be on controversial aspects of the religion. The purpose of this paper is to examine the unique religious practice of the month-long fast of Ramadan, especially its perceived role on marital and familial relationships from an insider’s perspective. Content analysis of in-depth, qualitative interviews of twenty diverse Shia and Sunni Muslim families living in the United States (N = 47 individuals) yielded several emergent themes. This study presents and explores data on the focal theme: “fasting brings us closer together.” These data suggest that Ramadan serves a sacred, unifying, and integrating purpose for many of the 47 practicing Muslim mothers, fathers, and youth in this study. Meanings and processes involved in Ramadan and family relationships are explored and explained. Implications and applications of the research findings are discussed and some potential directions for future research are outlined.