After the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and the subsequent war, Islam is finding a new and unexpected following of admirers and potential converts on both the right and left, according to two reports. The Free Press (November 18) reports that, influenced by the war in the Middle East, non-Arab, left-leaning Western women […]
The new attention being given to psychedelic substances in medicine and psychology has also found a hearing in mainline and unconventional religions, not least among the elusive yet expanding population of the non-affiliated or “nones.” The online magazine, The Conversation (October 31), reports that while abandoning mainstream religious affiliation, many nones turn to alternative expressions, […]
The share of new U.S. Catholic priests identifying as theologically “progressive” has dropped so low that the tendency has “all but vanished,” a study finds. The study, conducted by The Catholic Project at The Catholic University of America, is based on a new analysis of the project’s 2022 National Study of Catholic Priests. Billed as […]
The war in neighboring Ukraine is giving a new impetus to the competition between Russian and Romanian Orthodox Churches in Moldova, with some clergy leaving the first to join the second, reports the Nachrichtendienst Östliche Kirchen (November 16). Due to historical circumstances, the autonomous Moldovan Orthodox Church finds itself under the Russian Church and is […]
Producers of halal food could make higher profits by finding more non-Muslim customers, but marketing efforts remain limited despite promising developments, writes Heba Hashem in Salaam Gateway (November 6), a platform on the global Islamic economy. Several Muslim experts are convinced that halal food could expand into the mainstream food industry by appealing to people’s […]
■ As with sociologists of religion before them, anthropologists specializing in religion are branching out to study atheism and other forms of non-religion, according to the annual journal Religion & Society. The 2023 issue is devoted to anthropological studies of non-religion, although these focus less on the familiar sites of secularism, such as atheist and […]
While artificial intelligence (AI) has been imputed with spiritual, even mystical, power by its proponents and critics, Way of the Future is among the first organized religions based on the technology. The church was originally launched by Anthony Levandowski in 2015, while he was working on the self-driving technology Waymo for Google. Levandowski envisioned a […]
The largely affirmative response to the classic question of whether religion is good for democracy seems to have become more qualified over the last decade, articles in the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy (October) show. In recent years, scholars studying democracies have sounded the alarm about a “democratic recession” in the face of […]
Oriental Orthodox churches in the U.S. are outgrowing their sister Eastern Orthodox bodies, possibly even stealing some of their members, according to a new analysis of this venerable yet largely forgotten ancient church tradition hailing largely from the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. At the late-October conference of the Society for the Scientific […]
While the Worldwide Church of God no longer exists after the schisms and scandals this new religious movement experienced in the 1980s and ’90s, its offshoots continue to preserve important features of the movement and show some growth, writes J. Gordon Melton in the Journal of CESNUR (September/October), published by the Center on New Religions […]
