Even as other types of religious movements seem to attract more scholarly interest in recent years, the Jehovah’s Witnesses nevertheless continue to draw attention from researchers as a paradigmatic instance of Christian nonconformity and an enduring expression of organized millenarianism. Two new publications in recent month’s witness to this reality. Acta Comparanda (Subsidia III, €36 […]
The Sectarianism of the Islamic State, published last month by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, presents a thorough examination of the tangled roots of the ideologies and theologies that make up this unorthodox and lethal jihadist movement (whatever the secular motivations of its fighters). Hassan Hassan, author of the report, stresses that while the […]
We’re pleased to announce that the archives for the issues of RW from June 1997 to January 2016 are now online. Readers can go to the archives of this site to find a link to the earlier RW Archives or click on http://www.rwarchives.com/. Although the site is independent from the ISR-Religion Watch site, it features […]
The report Religion, Media, and the Digital Turn, published by the Religion and the Public Sphere Program of the Social Science Research Council, provides an in-depth examination of the way the digitalization of religious scholarship changes the message and the audience of such research. While not exactly a new development (the authors note that digital […]
The Muslim World devotes its January issue to the growth of fissures and sectarianism in Islamic societies generated by the Arab Spring. While the divide between Sunni and Shia forms of Islam is the most obvious source of widening schism in the Middle East and North Africa, contributors also look at more recent clashes within […]
Numen, a journal of the history of religions, devotes much of its January issue to historical and current developments in the Church of Scientology. Editor of the section James R. Lewis notes that although there is increasing scholarly opinion that L. Ron Hubbard established Scientology as a religion for purely pragmatic reasons, the articles treat […]
The title of the new book Religion and Innovation (Bloomsbury, $37.95), edited by Donald A. Yerxa, would no doubt be dismissed as a glaring oxymoron by new atheists and other strong secularists, who argue that religion serves the cause of progress only by accommodating it or, more typically, getting out of its way. But Yerxa […]
