When it comes to following gurus and spiritual masters, “[w]e have come to know too much to worship unconditionally,” says Bernhard Pörksen, a German media scholar and professor of media studies at the University of Tübingen, in an interview with Ursula Richard published in Buddhismus Aktuell, a German Buddhist quarterly (1st Quarter). He attributes this […]
The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) is still in a period of “revival” marked by the rehabilitation of its position in society and rapid institutional expansion, but “signs of crisis are mounting rapidly,” writes Sergey Chapnin in IWM Post (Fall/Winter), a publication of the Vienna-based Institute for Human Sciences. Chapnin argues that the positive tendencies characterizing […]
With some 10,000 Chinese-owned firms operating in Africa and hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers currently staying in African countries, an unexpected consequence is that some of them return home after having converted to Christianity, reports journalist Christopher Rhodes in UnHerd (Feb. 13). Rhodes remarks that having to live in such a different culture can […]
Despite the attempt of a syncretistic movement known as Chrislam to bridge the differences between Islam and Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa, the public reception to such groups has been characterized more by sharp debate and hostility than interest and acceptance, according to a study by Corey L. Williams in the journal Studies in World Christianity […]
The Catholic Church in the Philippines is losing its once substantial civic role as it faces growing secularism and an aggressively anti-Catholic president, writes Adam Willis in Commonweal magazine (February 22). While Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s stringent war on drugs has brought the church into confrontation with the government over its abuses, it has not […]
While the New Atheist movement, represented by such authors and spokesmen as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, has lost much of its public prominence, its contentious form of atheism is now more often directed at academic liberalism as well as Islam. In the magazine The Point (number 8), Jacob Hamburger writes that 2014 was the […]
There are signals of a new dynamism of the religious left in the U.S. for similar—if opposite—reasons to those that drove the Moral Majority on the right 40 years ago, writes Tom Gjelten in NPR News (Jan. 24). While they are still primarily “[keeping] their focus on protest rallies and social media campaigns” and remain […]
Changes to one of the special ceremonies held at the temples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) that extensively revised and eliminated references to traditional gender roles have been favorably received by church members and may result in more egalitarian attitudes toward gender roles among them, writes Benjamin Knoll in the […]
Interfaith dialogue at the international level is well-meaning, but it is unclear if it advances its stated goals of reducing tensions and conflicts, writes Jeffrey Haynes (London Metropolitan University) in an issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs (Fall 2018) devoted to interfaith on the world stage. Indeed, as the editors of the […]
A U.S.-style “culture war” seems unlikely in strongly secularized Dutch society, yet, with the help of American evangelical influence in the Netherlands’ small Bible Belt, this seems to be occurring, reports The Economist (January 9). In early January, 250 clerics, mainly from small conservative congregations, signed on to the Dutch version of the American-based Nashville […]
