The growing interference of the Military Rabbinate in military affairs and the influx of soldiers from religious Zionism have represented a significant shift for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), turning them into something quite different from the apolitical and areligious army dreamed of by the state’s founding fathers in 1948, writes Samy Cohen (Sciences Po […]
Although Catholicism remains central and widespread in the Philippines, the religious landscape is diversifying, with a noticeable growth and development of evangelical churches, writes Jérémy Ianni in Ad Extra (September 26), the French Catholic website of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, dedicated to reflections and dialogue about missionary work. While Catholicism, a legacy of Spanish […]
With this issue, Religion Watch enters its fifth decade of publication. It seems like a short time ago that we celebrated the 25th and 30th anniversaries of the newsletter; the first issue (see photo) rolling off the printing press (if readers can remember those machines) is still fresh in this editor’s mind. In another sense, […]
1) Baptize America is a new movement that seeks to encourage revival by holding baptism events for adult converts to Christianity. The movement was first founded as Baptize California by Pastor Mark Francey of the non-denominational Oceans Church in Orange County in 2023 and has since expanded nationwide. The movement draws on more than 650 […]
Just as there are secular and cultural Jews and, increasingly, people claiming to be “cultural Catholics,” Muslims are likewise claiming that identity, according to scholars speaking at the mid-August conference of the Association for the Sociology of Religion in Chicago, which RW attended. Survey research has found that almost a quarter of people from Muslim […]
Although mainline and evangelical churches and denominations have taken clear sides in the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, Catholics and the black church have either straddled the fence or experienced internal divisions about this contentious issue. In Commonweal magazine (July–August), Julie Schumacher Cohen writes that there has been a Catholic hesitancy in applying the church’s social […]
“Divine femininity” has become a popular phenomenon on social media, particularly TikTok, for its teaching that women need to harness a particular feminine energy to improve sex relations and everyday life, reports the magazine Teen Vogue (August 13). Sithara Ranasinghe writes that divine femininity is based on the idea that everyone holds two core energies […]
The Satanic Temple (TST), a quasi-religious and activist group seeking to spread secularism and strict church-state separation, is experiencing a “mass exit,” according to Diego Córdova and Ryan Cragun of the University of Tampa. In a paper presented at the August meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion in Chicago, attended by RW, […]
While Fethullah Gülen (1941–2024) was the undisputed leader of the Hizmet (“service”) movement for over 50 years, his authority gradually became routinized into a bureaucratic structure of hierarchies, procedures, and offices, writes Ida Hartmann (University of Copenhagen) in an article in Contemporary Islam (online August 25) focusing on the aftermath of the dramatic 2016 coup […]
A new study finds a correlation between online gaming and atheist or agnostic beliefs, but also an association between social media engagement and religious practices like scripture reading and congregational attendance. While there has been a growing body of research on the secularizing effect of the Internet, Baylor University sociologists Jennifer Laderi and Jeremy Uecker […]
