After facing a “stained glass ceiling of limitations” in Middle Eastern churches due to religious but also cultural restrictions, women are gradually ascending to the pulpit in the region, reports Mae Elise Cannon in Sojourner’s magazine (November). Even in churches that allow women’s ordination, such as the Presbyterian and Lutheran denominations, Middle Eastern congregations have […]
Religious groups in Korea continue to face controversy and some fallout from the pandemic, even though there has been considerable diversity in how Korean religions have dealt with the virus, according to scholars speaking at a roundtable session of the recent conference of the American Academy of Religion in San Antonio, which RW attended. The […]
The Covid-19 pandemic has influenced social and digital media consumption in Sri Lanka and given rise to a wave of hate speech and disinformation, with Muslims being the most targeted religious group, write Senel Wanniarachchi, Prihesh Ratnayake and Harindrini Corea in a chapter of the new book, Muslims in Post-War Sri Lanka. Anti-Muslim narratives have […]
Twenty-five years ago, prominent church historian George Marsden wrote The Soul of the American University, a widely hailed history and portrayal of Christian, specifically evangelical, higher education and its struggle to resist secularization. Now Marsden has revisited the subject in a new edition of the book, which is the subject of a symposium in the […]
Nordic animism is a growing phenomenon in Scandinavia, seeking to return to a native spirituality while distinguishing itself from Neopagan groups holding to ethnic nationalism. Founded by Swedish religious historian Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen, the diffuse movement has been influenced by the Brazilian religion Candomblé and links environmentalism with the return to animism. Rasmussen teaches that […]
Religious groups and volunteers, particularly evangelicals, are becoming a dominant influence in prisons thanks to a new model of incarceration that relies on outsourcing rehabilitation programming to faith groups, write Michael Hallett (North Florida State University) and Byron Johnson (Baylor University) in the online magazine Public Discourse (October 25). Facing unprecedented levels of violence and […]
Leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), who prophesized that Donald Trump would be reelected, show few signs of recanting their predictions, according to scholars assessing the movement at a recent meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, which RW attended. This is even as a formalization of the movement seems likely, […]
Suspicious about proselytizing initiatives targeting Jews, anti- missionary Jewish groups over the past few years have exposed several Christian missionaries posing as Orthodox Jews, including most recently a father and son who had changed their name from Dawson to Isaacson and been active as Orthodox rabbis in several U.S. Jewish communities, reports the Jewish Chronicle […]
The new, recently released Faith Communities Today (FACT) study shows continuing declines in congregational attendance, although about one-third of congregations report growth. The survey, which was conducted right before the pandemic and is issued every five years, was based on questions about congregational life sent to 15,278 congregations and their leaders from 80 denominations. The […]
While evangelicals in El Salvador, pandered to by the country’s conservative populist president, Nayib Bukele, have been met with growing suspicion by the left, this growing group of Christians has adopted many of the liberation theological views of Catholics, writes Claire Moll Namas in Religion and Global Society (October 25), a blog of the London […]
