New Amish groups are being established in non-traditional ways outside of the faith’s heartland in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, according to an article in the Washington Post (June 25). Two small South American settlements were both founded last fall after longstanding Mennonite communities in those countries reached out to North American Amish to explore affiliation, […]
First- and second-generation members of new religious movements (NRMs) experience similar conflicts when they leave these groups, although the latter find it much more difficult to exit and build new lives, according to a study in the Journal of Religion & Society (Vol. 18, 2016). Most of the information on ex-members of NRMs has focused […]
About 40 million of the 200 billion messages sent on Twitter last year consisted of Bible verses, with a high percentage of senders being either an elite group of religious leaders or “bots,” programs designed to create their own tweets, according to Christianity Today (June). The top two Bible passages are the favorites of evangelicals: […]
The future of public funding or support of religion in Europe is likely to become increasingly linked with its potential for positive contributions to society, according to several articles in the inaugural issue of the new French-language journal on religion and law, the Revue du Droit des Religions (May). The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) […]
Even as terrorists from Central Asia have taken the spotlight for their recent part in the Islamic State’s attack in Istanbul in late June, the region is seeing the emergence of “Islamo-democrats” who are challenging the influence of political Islam. The Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (Vol. 36, No. 2) reports that the growth of […]
The Sectarianism of the Islamic State, published last month by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, presents a thorough examination of the tangled roots of the ideologies and theologies that make up this unorthodox and lethal jihadist movement (whatever the secular motivations of its fighters). Hassan Hassan, author of the report, stresses that while the […]
Alienation among the younger generation from their homelands and dealing with trauma among survivors of kidnapping and sex trafficking are only two of the issues facing religious minorities in their struggle against the Islamic State (IS), according to activists and foreign affairs specialists speaking at a recent conference. The May conference at Fordham University in New York, attended by RW, sought to address the prospects for religious minorities in Iraq and Syria, particularly after the U.S. State Department recently declared the Islamic State as genocidal. The March declaration was the first political statement to include all the “stakeholders” in the conflict—Christians, Muslims, and Yazidis, a syncretistic and mystical religion. The speakers stressed the growing generation gap among these groups about their future in their homelands. Haider Elias, president of Yazda, an international Yazidi advocacy group, said that younger Yazidis “don’t want to go back [to Iraq and Syria]. Most want to go to Europe or the U.S., because they say this is not the first time and it won’t be the last [time that they have faced persecution]. It’s not just ISIS; they’ve lost trust in the government and the surrounding community.” The Yazidi population, already less than one million throughout the world, has declined sharply in their home countries of Iraq and Syria, and 20 percent of them are in refugee camps.
Recent expressions of the charismatic movement still find their inspiration in the Toronto Blessing movement of the 1990s, but they are more likely to stress supernatural miracles, the role of laypeople in healing, and ministry to the poor, writes Michael McClymond in the Pentecostal studies journal Pneuma (38). The Toronto Blessing, called the “laughing revival,” […]
While Buddhist meditators have been prodded and probed by neuroscientists and medical researchers, a wider range of Buddhist practices and rituals have been hailed by practitioners for their healing benefits and are gaining new attention. In the Buddhist magazine Tricycle (Summer), C. Pierce Salguero writes that “Buddhist healing practices that one might think of as […]
A recent survey finds that admiration of Pope Francis has dropped sharply. In a survey by the British firm YouGov on the most admired men, the pope fell seven spots in 2016, from sixth down to 13th among the world’s men, the biggest drop for anyone on last year’s list, and is now no longer the world’s […]
