◼ The rise of the narrative of persecuted Christians around the world not only encourages American evangelicals to help victims abroad, but is also linked to a process of their seeing themselves as victims, part of a global community under attack, writes Melani McAlister (George Washington University) in an issue of The Review of Faith […]
The phenomenon of the non-affiliated or “nones” has been prodded and probed from every available angle, although most often by social scientists and religious professionals concerned about what the rising tide of nones means for the future of institutional religion. Public Discourse, the electronic weekly newsletter of the conservative Witherspoon Institute, devoted its August 18 […]
The current issue of the Review of Religion and Chinese Society (6:1) is devoted to “negotiations and diversifications of China’s Christianities.” The stress on “negotiation” among these articles suggests that church-state outcomes in China are far from uniform, varying by the resources and strategies that churches employ in bargaining with officials for various privileges and […]
Twentysomething Soul (Oxford University Press, $29.95) looks beyond the barrage of research and reporting on non-affiliated young Americans to also examine those who have a strong attachment to their congregations and faith. These “active affiliated” Christian young adults are not as unusual as one might think, argue authors Timothy Clydesdale of the College of New […]
The fact that the latest (2019) edition of the World Almanac of Islamism (American Foreign Policy Council, $119) has expanded to two huge volumes (totaling about 1,500 pages) suggests that there has been a significant increase in groups and individuals involved in Muslim-based political activism. But it should be noted that the term “Islamist” is […]
The current issue of the open-access Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet (Vol. 14) is devoted to the impact of online religion on faith communities. There is much conjecture about how online involvement affects religious belonging and community but not much actual research about this relationship in all its variety of settings and contexts. […]
RW has covered the rise and growth of FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students), and now Katherine Dugan fills out the picture considerably, showing how this group has fused evangelical practices and fervor with orthodox Catholicism in her new book Millennial Missionaries (Oxford University Press, $34.95). As its title implies, the book provides an in-depth […]
The rise of Hindu nationalism and the way it has morphed, particularly during the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, into what is called “Neo-Hindutva,” a diffuse movement comprising various leaders and strategies, is the subject of a special issue of the journal Contemporary South Asia (Volume 26, No. 4). The contributors view Neo-Hindutva as […]
British researcher Sophie Gilliat-Ray gained notoriety in 2005 (mainly among Muslims) for an article detailing the lack of access she experienced in trying to study the seminaries of a strict form of Islam practiced by Deobandi Muslims (whose name derives from their origins in an Indian town by that name). Now in the current issue […]
The report Islam as Statecraft from the Brookings Institution looks closer at the “geopolitics of religious soft power” used by Islamic countries in their foreign policy. Authors Peter Mandaville and Shadi Hamid write that “soft power,” which means the use of cultural outreach, including religion, in foreign relations and policy, is not confined to Islamic […]
