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 […]
The issue of spiritual abuse by Muslim leaders is being tackled by ground initiatives and organizations, similarly to what has been taking place in other religious traditions, writes journalist and novelist Hanan Sulaiman in Ahram Online (January 6). Some Sufi spiritual leaders in particular are being targeted by groups confronting spiritual and sexual abuse in […]
The Covid pandemic has “accelerated people’s comings and goings and has required new strategies to welcome and assimilate new members into the church community,” writes Melissa Morgan Kelley in Christianity Today (January 18). Along with other life changes wrought by Covid, for “those who were already struggling with their church, the pandemic served as a […]
The recent growth of anti-Semitic incidents, most vividly seen in early January’s hostage crisis at a Texas synagogue, is most threatening to Jews who are religiously observant, writes Mark Oppenheimer in the Wall Street Journal (January 19). He notes that most of the recent attacks against Jews, which also include the shootings at a synagogue […]
The blog of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture (January 13), which offers an annual forecast for the upcoming year, is predicting for 2022 such “megatrends” as a turn to authoritarian government and religion and a virtual reality-based “metaverse,” where online “spiritual experience entrepreneurs” will seek to usurp the role of in-person and lived […]
Muslim organizations in the U.S., Canada, and the UK are becoming increasingly outspoken advocates for Uyghur Muslims, who are suffering genocide under the Chinese government, according to Axios (January 2). While the governments of many Muslim-majority countries have faced criticism for their non-involvement and silence about China’s repression of their co-religionists, Muslim laypeople have been organizing and […]
While two-thirds of Canadians report a religious affiliation, this is the first time that the proportion has dropped below 70 percent, reports Ashleigh Stewart in a three-part series on religious transformations in Canada published by Global News (January 8–16). Some religious leaders are hopeful, though, that shifts forced by the pandemic have opened new ways […]
