Twenty five years after the end of the USSR, it is clearer how religious minorities in the Caucasus region have adjusted to environments in which new national identities have succeeded the Soviet common identity and how such pluralism is “managed” by majorities in power. Each country of the Caucasus has a clear majority religious group: […]
The Muslim World devotes its January issue to the growth of fissures and sectarianism in Islamic societies generated by the Arab Spring. While the divide between Sunni and Shia forms of Islam is the most obvious source of widening schism in the Middle East and North Africa, contributors also look at more recent clashes within […]
1.) The Brooklyn, NY, based Pop-up Shabbat is the latest in an ongoing trend of dinner-based congregations, but in this case the Jewish communal meal is not free and forms only one part of its operation. Building on the Silicon Valley business model of developing “engaged community, high quality content and commercial products,” Pop-Up Shabbat […]
The growth of religiously non-affiliated Americans or the “nones” is leading to a significant shift in religious publishing, not only in marketing books to religious professionals attempting to win nones back to the faith but also in targeting this amorphous group of readers that includes a mix of disaffected believers and non-believers. Publisher’s Weekly (Feb. […]
The days when evangelicals defined themselves by their uncompromising style of biblical interpretation may be over according to an article by religion writer Jim Hinch, senior editor for Guideposts magazine, in the Los Angeles Review of Books (Feb. 15). Hinch sees this growing diversity as part of a wider transformation of evangelical Christianity confronted by […]
American evangelical colleges are under pressure to diversify their student body and faculty as well as their worship programs according to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Feb. 5). The recent controversy over the firing of professor Larycia Hawkins from Wheaton College over her beliefs about Islam (claiming that Christians and Muslims worship […]
Jewish-Christian relations have appeared to enter a new stage of tolerance and acceptance, although it is uncertain to what degree the new conciliatory attitudes will reach laypeople on the congregational level. In an exchange of letters marking the 50th anniversary of the Vatican document Nostra Aetate in December, more than 50 Orthodox rabbis issued a […]
The perception that the Christian faith is “extreme” is “now firmly entrenched among the nation’s non-Christians,” according to a study by David Kinnaman of the Barna Group. Three-quarters of all Americans—and nine out of ten Americans with no religious affiliation—hold that religious extremism is a threat to society, most likely a reaction to the growth […]
The Czech Republic has been called the most secular and atheistic society in the world, but its atheism is actually not much higher than in other European countries, and churches still play important roles in the nation writes sociologist Petr Pabian in the current issue of the Czech theological journal Communio Vittorum (1:2015). Pabian argues […]
While new religious movements (NRMs) tend to be seen by church and state authorities as a threat to “spiritual security” in the Russian Federation, they seem mostly to be perceived as a minor and relatively innocuous phenomenon in other post-Soviet countries if one reads the articles on various NRMs in Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Poland, Slovenia, […]
