Hip-hop music, a counterculture genre that emerged in the 1970s on the black and Latino streets of the Bronx, has seen a gradual shift toward Christian themes in recent years, reports Sandi Dolbee in the San Diego Union-Tribune (June 13).
Increasing numbers of African American mosques are closing while the overall number of mosques in the United States continues to expand, according to a new report. “The American Mosque 2020: Growing and Evolving,” a study jointly published by the Islamic Society of North America, the Center on Muslim Philanthropy, and the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding was conducted by Ihsan Bagby, who produced similar reports in 2001 and 2010.
Attacks against Afro-Brazilian religious groups led by evangelical Christians in Brazil have increased in recent years, causing human rights watchdog groups and activists to press for a “terrorist” designation for such perpetrators, writes Danielle Boaz of the University of North Carolina in the online Journal of Religion & Society (Vol. 23).
The accommodations made by the Vatican for celebrating the Tridentine (Latin) rite may be taking a more turbulent turn in the post-Vatican II Catholic Church judging by recent events in France. La Croix International (June 29) reports that the Archdiocese of Dijon has asked the traditionalist Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP) to leave due […]
Violations of religious freedom by India’s government are not only committed against minority religions but also increasingly against Hindu institutions, writes Timothy Shah in the online journal Religions (12). What Shah calls India’s “other religious freedom problem” can be seen in the way the country’s Hindu nationalist government has enacted “controls and limits on majority religious institutions[,]…an oppressive and invasive reality that is simply out of step with what.
While jihadists have long been critical of China for its discriminatory policies toward Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the country’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) means it will create infrastructures in areas where jihadist cells are also present, thus creating new threats for Chinese companies and citizens, writes Jan Wojcik (a board member of the European Issues Institute, an independent think tank based in Warsaw) in an article published on the European Eye on Radicalization website (June 25).
Pure Land Buddhism is the latest religion to face banning by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), reports Deng Huizhong in the online newsletter Bitter Winter (June 17). In May in Jilin province, the police interrogated followers of Buddhist Master Jingzong of Hongyuan Monastery, which is located in Xuancheng, Anhui province.
Even if it is not the case across the board, we often hear more of religious decline than vitality today, so that the new book The Demise of Religion (Bloomsbury Academic, $115) seems to fit the mood. But the anthology, edited by Michael Strausberg, Stuart A. Wright, and Carole M. Cusack, actually delivers a more nuanced message than the forecasts of inevitable religious decline and secularization. The varied case studies suggest that just as religious organizations can die, they can also be revived and reinvent themselves, with new related ones being born.
“Cults are in style again. Or at least it’s trendy to call things cults—everything from QAnon to SoulCycle,” writes Jesse Walker in Reason magazine (June). Up until recently, “cults,” or new religious movements (NRM), were thought to have little appeal for Americans, especially as compared to the decades of the 1960s to the 1990s. But J. Gordon Melton, an NRM specialist at Baylor University, says that while we may not be reliving the early 1990s, there has been an intensification of cult and anti-cult rhetoric in American culture.
Is “woke” identity politics squeezing out religious practice at elite American colleges? That is the contention of Anna Keating, a former Catholic chaplain at an unnamed elite college in New England, in a controversial blog article in the Hedgehog Review (May 4). Although only focusing on one college, Keating has subsequently said in a video interview [see below] that what she witnessed is fairly common at other elite institutions.
