Evangelical culture has appeared to become more accepting of vulgarity and even profanity, though the sources of such a change are contested. In the New York Times (March 17), Ruth Graham reports on how conservative leaders and “influencers” in politics and the media have appealed to and been accepted by many evangelicals in vulgar and […]
High school students’ religious attendance and the importance they assign to religion in their lives have undergone significant declines over the last 27 years. In his newsletter Graphs about Religion (March 7), Ryan Burge analyzes datasets from the annual survey of high school students, “Monitoring the Future,” from 1995 and 2022, focusing on high school […]
Israel’s failure to understand the threat posed by Hamas, leading up to the October 7 attack, has been attributed to many factors, but the role of artificial intelligence and the technology’s blind spot toward Palestinian Islamic jihadism should not be discounted, writes Ofira Seliktar in the foreign policy journal Orbis (Spring). Israel’s leaders were of […]
While the Catholic Church’s traditional prescriptions concerning bodily asceticism are largely ignored by the faithful, even in monasteries marked by “the progressive imposition of the prerogative of health over asceticism,” forms of voluntary reduction of consumption are appearing in secular society. This observation prompted sociologist Isabelle Jonveaux (University of Graz) to conduct research in Austria […]
There are growing tensions between Catholics and evangelicals in Europe, inflamed by remaining church-state disputes in areas where Catholicism is still dominant, reports Christianity Today (March). Concerns about growing secularism in Europe in recent years have led to more conciliatory attitudes and efforts between evangelical Protestants and Catholics. But although the Catholic Church no longer […]
Younger generations are increasingly turning to the supernatural to weather bad economic times in post-zero Covid China—from engaging in birth-chart readings, horoscopes and hexagrams to personalized advice from a psychic master—“all mediated, in true 21st-century fashion, by an app,” writes Aaron Sarin in the online publication Quillette (March 26), a publication covering free speech issues. […]
1) Emet Classical Academy is the first Jewish classical school, seeking to “make sense of the West in a Jewish way.” Most classical schools that have been established in recent years have backgrounds in Catholic and Protestant worlds, stressing engagement in foundational texts for Western civilization, learning Latin and Greek, and character formation. Emet, located […]
As the election season heats up, Christian nationalism is again in the headlines and even in movie marquees (with the new film, God and Country ), but researchers are increasingly divided about the strength and even the identity of the diffuse movement. A new study from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), in cooperation with […]
Younger Christians are “reclaiming Lent” by rehabilitating older traditions as a reaction against techniques of self-help and self-optimization both within evangelical churches and in the broader culture, writes Molly Worthen in the New York Times (February 18). In informal interviews, Worthen finds that younger Christians who have recently adopted Lenten traditions, such as fasting, often […]
There is a modest revival of conservative Christian women using veils and other head coverings during worship, reports Gottesdienst (February 27), a journal of Lutheran liturgy. While traditional Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox women have long taken up the veil during their liturgies, this practice is now spreading among conservative Lutherans, Reformed Church members, and […]
