Shinto, Japan’s indigenous religion, is going global, writes anthropologist Kaitlyn Ugoretz in the online magazine The Conversation (February 10). The small but growing community of Shinto practitioners scattered around the world has been created largely through online rituals and practices circulated by Shinto temples and groups (though not from Japan, where such online services are […]
Taizé, an ecumenical monastic community in France with a worldwide following of young Christians, has changed in recent years, addressing issues surrounding immigration in Europe, the pandemic, and clerical sex abuse, reports Stephanie Saldana in the Jesuit magazine America (February). Taizé was started during World War II by Protestants seeking the monastic life and church […]
Canada’s trucker protests over vaccine mandates suggest a degree of religious influence, though it carries as much American as Canadian inspiration, reports the National Review magazine (February 14). Nate Hochman writes that “As more protesters flock to the Ottawa trucker convoy to protest Canada’s pandemic restrictions, the movement has taken on an explicitly Christian tone. […]
A new study finds religious behavioral responses to the Covid pandemic, such as prayer, to be positively correlated with medically advised measures like mask-wearing and social distancing. The study, published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (online February) and conducted by West Virginia University researchers Katie E. Corcoran, Bernard DiGregorio, and Chris […]
The commitment of Christian Democrat political figures had been central to Europe’s reconstruction process after World War II, but religion has again become a topic for the European Union (EU) over the past 20 years, due to concerns about both radical Islam and the use of religious themes by populist political movements. These issues are […]
Throughout Armenian history, even when many Armenians were dispersed and no longer had their own state, the Armenian Apostolic Church has played a key role as a national church. However, according to Matthieu Barlet of the Observatoire Pharos, a French think tank monitoring religious and cultural trends around the world, the linkage between Armenian identity […]
With much of the West’s attention fixated on Russia and Ukraine, the political influence of Islam shows signs of both decline and resurgence. In the scholarly newsletter Quillette (January 21), Imran Said reports that Islamist governments, “once seen as an unstoppable force throughout most of the Muslim world,” are now seen as being incapable of […]
Less anchored in their ways than traditional religions, new religious movements (NRMs) offer a rich field for research on radical transformations. This topic is the focus of a new volume edited by Beth Singler and Eileen Barker, Radical Transformations in Minority Religions (Routledge, $160). Its 17 chapters cover a varied landscape, from themes such as […]
1) The Global Flourishing Study (GFS) is a new project conducted jointly by Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion and Program on Pro-Social Behavior and Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Project, that will look at the factors shaping human betterment, including its religious dimensions. The project will involve data collection from some 240,000 participants from […]
While evangelicals have moved into an era where society views them negatively, they haven’t found a strategy to deal with their more marginal status, writes Aaron M. Renn in the magazine First Things (February). Renn writes that the increasing fragmentation of evangelicals is largely due to the different ways they have sought to extend their […]
