The latest findings from a survey on the congregational engagement of Christian church attenders in the aftermath of Covid suggest that most attenders have either remained consistently engaged or have increased their worship attendance. The results of the 2024 Exploring the Pandemic Impact on Congregations (EPIC) Attender Survey were based on responses from more than […]
A recent controversial report from the French Senate on the Muslim Brotherhood notes that the organization has built an extensive ideological infrastructure in France—“not through violence, but through schools, charities, mosques, and soft power.” The report, based on intelligence files, field investigations, and dozens of interviews conducted by two civil servants, finds that the “Brotherhood’s […]
As a reaction against state-imposed religion, secular aspirations have been building up for decades in Iran, and the religious foundations of the current regime are being increasingly questioned, with protest movements in recent years emphasizing “Iran” instead of “Islam.” Mahdi Rezaei-Tazik, a political scientist at the University of Bern, Switzerland, who focuses on criticism of […]
Historical trajectories, ideological differences, and shifting geopolitical realities shaped both the making and unmaking of the Islamist alliance between the current ruling party of Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), and the (Arabic) Muslim Brotherhood (MB), writes historian Jan-Markus Vömel in a detailed report published by the Documentation Centre Political Islam in Vienna, Austria […]
The resurgence of Tengrism in Kazakhstan has been decried as an artificial and political project by a number of scholars, but researchers report in the Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe (Vol. 45, Issue 5) on recent evidence of a “growing interest in Tengrism…driven by spiritual exploration as well as the quest for identity […]
A secularization theorist himself, Detlef Pollack (University of Münster, Germany) still claims to be surprised to see a dramatic decline of religion in many regions of the world, as he releases the third, revised edition of his book (in German), Religion in der Moderne: Ein internationaler Vergleich (€ 49), co-authored with his colleague, Gergely Rosta. […]
The 4 a.m. Club, the brainchild of self-proclaimed psychic Gia Prism, may be the closest thing to QAnon among progressive and left-leaning people. The club is a confederation of spiritually inclined women who all claim to have woken up suddenly around 4 a.m. on November 6 with a sinking feeling that Donald Trump had won […]
While it has been widely noted, often by theologians and other religious leaders, that the “new atheism” has fallen out of favor, no longer drawing the large following that it had in the early 2000s, more academic researchers are now weighing in on this noticeable shift. The new atheism was marked by its emphasis on […]
Like other universities facing the contemporary challenges of market pressures and new governmental measures, such as those targeting DEI policies, Christian colleges are being forced to rethink their missions and adopt new models, writes John Seel in Aaron Renn’s Substack newsletter (May 20). While elite “institutions often deploy ideological gatekeeping, endowment resources, and legacy prestige […]
Amidst the reports and claims of religious revival in recent months [see last month’s RW], the role of young men, especially those returning or converting to Eastern Orthodox churches, stands out. Soon after the pandemic, there were anecdotes and some survey results showing that Eastern Orthodox parishes had more resilience in attendance than other churches, […]
