Readers are by now probably as exhausted in keeping up with articles on Covid and its impact on religious communities as with the virus itself—not only because of the vast accumulation of material on the subject but also because the pandemic is ongoing and changing, making its effects unpredictable. However, the Finnish journal Approaching Religion […]
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 […]
Throughout August and September, the Berkley Center for Religion and World Affairs at Georgetown University, through its Berkley Forum, has issued a series of reports and reflections on Covid-19 and the Russian Orthodox Church that provide an important resource for understanding changes taking place in church-state relations in Russia. Several writers note how the pandemic […]
The French Catholic conservative magazine La Nef devotes its July–August issue to an overview of the traditionalist milieu, a movement that has gained wide interest after Pope Francis issued a recent document restricting Latin Masses.
Even if it is not the case across the board, we often hear more of religious decline than vitality today, so that the new book The Demise of Religion (Bloomsbury Academic, $115) seems to fit the mood. But the anthology, edited by Michael Strausberg, Stuart A. Wright, and Carole M. Cusack, actually delivers a more nuanced message than the forecasts of inevitable religious decline and secularization. The varied case studies suggest that just as religious organizations can die, they can also be revived and reinvent themselves, with new related ones being born.
The journal Mormon Studies Review devotes most of its current issue (Vol. 8) to politics among Latter-day Saints, both on a global scale and in the American context. The lead article looks at how the rapid global expansion of Mormonism has had some impact on members’ political commitments. Laurie F. Maffy-Kipp writes that the LDS church has lived in the tension of maintaining an American uniformity of teachings, practices, and structure throughout the world (which non-Western converts value) while increasingly adapting to and innovating in different societies.
The current issue of the journal Implicit Religion (23:2) is devoted to “new directions in the study of Scientology,” and shows how less attention is being given to the Church of Scientology proper and its decades-long controversies and more to its offshoots, known as the Free Zone, and to non-institutional aspects of the movement.
The Journal of CESNUR, a publication of the Center for the Study of New Religions, devotes its March/April issue to the Plymouth Brethren and the changes this small but influential conservative Christian movement has undergone recently. The Brethren fall into two main groupings, the “exclusive” and the “open” Brethren (who are largely integrated within world evangelicalism), but the issue focuses on the former, especially since they have been at the center of so much contention.
The new book The Routledge Handbook on Religion and Cites (Routledge, $250; e-version, $47.65), edited by Katie Day and Elise Edwards, presents the state of the art on research about religion in the urban context. In the introduction, Day and Edwards write that while there has been renewed attention to religion and cities, there has been less focus on the specific places and spaces and how they interact with religious institutions at the community level.
Pneuma, the journal of Pentecostal studies, devotes a double issue (42) to the futures of charismatic and Pentecostal movements around the world. Although seen as a global religious movement of approximately 400 million adherents, the articles in this issue suggest that the churches in each region are facing particular issues in gaining or maintaining vitality and influence.
