Suspicious about proselytizing initiatives targeting Jews, anti- missionary Jewish groups over the past few years have exposed several Christian missionaries posing as Orthodox Jews, including most recently a father and son who had changed their name from Dawson to Isaacson and been active as Orthodox rabbis in several U.S. Jewish communities, reports the Jewish Chronicle […]
Twenty years after the Islamic jihadist attacks on 9/11, and amidst the perception that such terrorism has waned, “there is a significant risk of jihadi resurgence,” writes Colin Clarke in the CTC Sentinel (September), the publication of the Combating Terrorism Center based at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Most terrorism specialists acknowledge that […]
Is religious architecture in a state of decline? It may depend on which architectural authority one is consulting, writes John L. Allen. In an article originally appearing on the Catholic website Crux, and reprinted in Christian News (September 6), Allen reports that a recent survey of the 25 most significant architectural works of the postwar […]
Muslim women are reportedly facing a “marriage crisis” in the U.S., as increasing numbers are experiencing divorces as well as difficulties finding Muslim husbands. An interview appearing in the Washington Post blog The Lily (September 20) features Tahirah Nailah Dean, an Afro-Latina Muslim lawyer and writer who has collaborated on a new photo series documenting […]
While Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Nashville, Tennessee, have been viewed as evangelical bastions and bellwethers since the 1990s, the changing fortunes of evangelicalism in much of the U.S. have also been reflected in the changing religious makeup of these cities. But in two separate articles profiling the cities, Christianity Today magazine (July/August) notes how evangelicals’ […]
Both Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism have been seen as the more stable segments of Christianity in the U.S., but political pressures, such as the growth of populism, and the loss of Christian influence in the country are leading to new divisions and even fragmentation among these Christians, according to two reports.
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has been in the spotlight lately, not only for its national meeting in early June, but also for the way that the 14 million-member denomination is said to reflect the wide-ranging changes evangelicalism is undergoing. In the space of a few months, the church body has undergone its own “racial reckoning” over the controversial “critical race theory” (CRT), a continuing scandal over clergy sexual abuse, and rumors of an impending schism between ultraconservatives and the SBC mainstream over church teachings and politics.
“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.
President Biden’s publicly visible faith and the polarized views of him among American Catholics reflect both a struggle within the faith over its direction and a political struggle over the Catholic vote. In a feature article in Time magazine (April 12/April 19), Brian Bennett notes that while they were formerly a reliably Democratic constituency, growing divisions among Catholics have made them a key target for both major parties, with Republicans seeking to win over Hispanic Catholics in particular as part of their effort to expand their voter base beyond older whites.
Religion Watch recently interviewed John Jay College sociologist Amy Adamczyk about her research on how parents transmit religious faith to their children. Adamczyk is the co-author, with Christian Smith, of the new book, Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion on to the Next Generation (Oxford University Press, $29.95). The book is based on interviews with religious and non-religious parents as well as an analysis of survey research.
