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. […]
Boko Haram, known for its Islamic jihadist terrorism in Nigeria, has slowly evolved from an organization under siege by the government to one estranged from its Muslim rivals and now actively targeting fellow Muslims with violence, writes Abubakar Abubakar Usman of the Asia Middle East Centre for Research and Dialogue (Malaysia). Writing in the journal […]
1) Vietnamese-American Catholics have become a source of vocational growth and vitality in the American church and the Vietnamese Eucharistic Youth Movement (VEYM) has served as their nerve center. While Vietnamese Americans make up only 1 to 2 percent of the American Catholic population, they represent 12 percent of seminarians. The VEYM has 136 chapters, […]
A significant segment of young-adult (YA) fiction is written by Mormon writers, although the growth of LGBTQ themes within the genre is causing strain among these authors and their readers, reports the New York Times (September 3). Although it is difficult to quantify, the article by Abby Aguirre reports that “Latter-day Saints are some of […]
Annual denominational gatherings may continue, but many of the trappings of annual conventions seem to have outlived their purposes, according to the Forum Letter (September), an independent Lutheran newsletter. Peter Speckhard writes about the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s (LCMS) recent convention in Milwaukee but suggests that his portrayal of the end of an era may apply […]
Just as Christian chaplains are filling in for the roles that traditional congregations and clergy used to play, a new breed of Jewish chaplains is meeting spiritual needs that synagogues once catered to, write Bethamie Horowitz, Wendy Cadge, and Joseph Weisberg in Contemporary Jewry (online in September). The researchers also find that Jewish chaplains are […]
A new survey finds that college students with a religious identity report significantly higher rates of heterosexuality than their atheist, agnostic and non-affiliated counterparts. On the website Get Religion (September 20), political scientist Ryan Burge analyzes new data from FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), a free speech organization, which runs an annual […]
Besides ambiguities in the Russian Orthodox assessment of the Soviet regime, even its rejection of the Soviet past has rarely translated into an engagement with a democratic agenda, writes Alexander Agadjanian (Yerevan State University, Armenia) in the current issue of the Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies (5:2, dated 2022, but just published). Agadjanian starts by […]
With the war impacting all religious groups in the country, it has also affected Ukrainian Muslims, who have responded with humanitarian initiatives, the development of the military chaplaincy, and calls for help to foreign Islamic organizations, writes Oleg Yarosh (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) in Religion & Gesellschaft in Ost und West (September). Before […]
