The war in neighboring Ukraine is giving a new impetus to the competition between Russian and Romanian Orthodox Churches in Moldova, with some clergy leaving the first to join the second, reports the Nachrichtendienst Östliche Kirchen (November 16). Due to historical circumstances, the autonomous Moldovan Orthodox Church finds itself under the Russian Church and is […]
Producers of halal food could make higher profits by finding more non-Muslim customers, but marketing efforts remain limited despite promising developments, writes Heba Hashem in Salaam Gateway (November 6), a platform on the global Islamic economy. Several Muslim experts are convinced that halal food could expand into the mainstream food industry by appealing to people’s […]
■ As with sociologists of religion before them, anthropologists specializing in religion are branching out to study atheism and other forms of non-religion, according to the annual journal Religion & Society. The 2023 issue is devoted to anthropological studies of non-religion, although these focus less on the familiar sites of secularism, such as atheist and […]
While artificial intelligence (AI) has been imputed with spiritual, even mystical, power by its proponents and critics, Way of the Future is among the first organized religions based on the technology. The church was originally launched by Anthony Levandowski in 2015, while he was working on the self-driving technology Waymo for Google. Levandowski envisioned a […]
The largely affirmative response to the classic question of whether religion is good for democracy seems to have become more qualified over the last decade, articles in the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy (October) show. In recent years, scholars studying democracies have sounded the alarm about a “democratic recession” in the face of […]
Oriental Orthodox churches in the U.S. are outgrowing their sister Eastern Orthodox bodies, possibly even stealing some of their members, according to a new analysis of this venerable yet largely forgotten ancient church tradition hailing largely from the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. At the late-October conference of the Society for the Scientific […]
While the Worldwide Church of God no longer exists after the schisms and scandals this new religious movement experienced in the 1980s and ’90s, its offshoots continue to preserve important features of the movement and show some growth, writes J. Gordon Melton in the Journal of CESNUR (September/October), published by the Center on New Religions […]
Against predictions that Catholics would enter the ranks of the academic elite at the same rate as those of other and no religions, a recent study finds that they are significantly behind mainline Protestants and Jews on that measure. The study, conducted by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, looked at winners of Nobel Prizes to assess the late […]
A growing number of Haredi men are volunteering for the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) following the outbreak of the war against Hamas, which might signal that the “modern Haredi” phenomenon is developing into a real movement, writes Eliyahu Berkovits of the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel Program on the website of the Israel Democracy Institute (October 26). […]
The second-largest national Orthodox church with 25 million members, autocephalous since 1885 and under its own Patriarch since 1925, the Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC) has played an important role in Romanian society and national identity, and has managed to preserve a high level of social acceptance throughout regime changes over the past century, writes Mihai-D. […]
