Evangelicals are using new musical forms that go significantly beyond “traditional” contemporary Christian music (CCM) in both worship and outreach, but such experimentation may have unintended consequences for churches according to two reports. Christianity Today magazine (July–August) reports on the rise of electronic dance music (EDM) in evangelical churches that may be challenging the lyric-based […]
The critical attitude toward environmental controls and regulations and the withdrawal from the Paris accord on climate by the Trump administration appears to be driving up the environmental activism of American churches reports The Economist magazine (July 28). The Erasmus blog of the magazine reports that “green-minded congregations, and even those who have not hitherto […]
There are probably 3,000 Brazilian Protestant missionaries abroad, mostly Pentecostal, and 90 percent of them are sent by Brazilian missionary agencies, reported Paul Freston (Wilfrid Laurier University) at the conference of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion in Lausanne, Switzerland (July 4–7), which RW attended. One in five Brazilians today is Pentecostal. Like […]
While some ethical values of young adult Buddhists in the U.K. strongly correlate with broader youth culture—e.g. gender equality—other values do not cohere well, such as reluctance about high alcohol consumption, reported Sarah-Jane Page (Aston University) in her paper presented at the conference of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion in Lausanne (July […]
India may well be on its way to becoming a Hindu state, even as its secular constitution remains officially in force, writes Christophe Jaffrelot in the Journal of Democracy (July). In an article marking the 70th anniversary of democracy in India, the political scientist notes that much of this change toward favoring Hinduism and cracking […]
The large wave of new Muslim immigrants in Germany are showing themselves to be less religiously conservative than the pre-existing Muslim community as well as more concerned with integrating into mainstream German society, reports The Atlantic magazine (July 26). The more than one million refugees that have settled in Germany are from Muslim-majority countries and […]
The celebration of the slava feast throughout Serbia blends secular, familial, and religious elements, but the observance is also increasingly tied to the Serbian Orthodox Church and nationalism, writes Sabina Hadzibulic in the journal Temenos (53:1), the journal of the Finnish Society for the Study of Religion. Besides Christmas and Easter, slava is the most […]
Critics still see the Muslim Brotherhood as a source of Islamic extremism, but the New York Times (July 16) reports that the movement is struggling for survival in its birthplace of Egypt and among exiles. Current members of the group, many of whom are in exile or in prison, say the group has become more […]
Christianity is exerting a growing presence in China not only through proliferating churches but also due to their architectural style and geography, writes Michel Chambon in the journal Studies in World Christianity (July/August). The anthropologist studied the locations and architectural styles of congregations in the city of Nanping and the province of Fujian, an area […]
American Indians have long had the attention of missionaries and evangelists, but more recently they have become the protagonists of numerous prophecies by charismatic Christians that the First Nation tribes and their reservations are the harbingers of revival in America, according to Charisma magazine (June). In 1975, Billy Graham prophesied that Native Americans hold the […]
