With Religion Watch having become available for free, one of our goals has been to make available online those years of our newsletter that had only been published in print (i.e. pre-1998 issues). Thanks to the patient work of associate editor Jean-Francois Mayer in designing and updating the files, and to Frances Malone, who patiently […]
An interesting footnote to last month’s feature article on the growing alliance between American evangelicals and Eastern Orthodoxy over the role of Vladimir Putin is the influence of mid-20th century Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin. An article in the Journal of Classical Sociology (online November) by sociologists Dmitry Uzlaner and Kristina Stoeckl finds that Sorokin’s legacy, […]
British sociologist Grace Davie presents an extended essay on local and global developments in British religion in the online report Religion in Public Life: Leveling the Ground. Presented as a series of lectures at the University of Birmingham and published by the think tank Theos, the 100-page report starts with her region of Exeter and […]
Parish and Place (Oxford University Press, $24.95), by Tricia Colleen Bruce, provides an in-depth look at the phenomena of personal parishes in the Catholic Church in the U.S., showing how they mirror Catholic diversity and how the institutional church manages pluralism. The church hierarchy establishes these parishes to serve specific groups that are not being […]
Much of the current issue of the journal of Religion, Brain & Behavior (May) is devoted to developing a research program and theory that explains religious diversity just as Darwinian scientists have sought to explain biological diversity. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists have had difficulty in explaining the persistence and diversity of religion. Those anthropologists and […]
The International Yearbook of Religious Demography (Brill, $98) has quickly emerged as the equivalent to an annual journal on religion and demography. With its global reach and plethora of useful statistics, the 2017 yearbook, edited Brian Grim, Todd Johnson, Vegard Skirbekk, and Gina A. Zurlo, yields important insights on issues ranging from the familiar ground […]
ISR co-director Byron Johnson, William H. Wubbenhorst, and Alfreda Alvarez recently issued Assessing the Faith-Based Response to Homelessness in America. The 146-page report is based on an initial 11-city study on faith-based organization’s (FBO) impact on homelessness, measuring the percentage of emergency shelter beds provided by these ministries. The report also includes a 3-year projection […]
The journal Current Anthropology (April) features a symposium on fluid religious identities, with participants arguing that the religious “itinerant” is the rule rather than the exception today. Authors Yonathan N. Gez, Yvan Droz, Edio Soares, and Jeanne Ray even coin a term for the phenomenon of dynamic religious identity—“butinage” (which refers to the practice of […]
The current issue of the journal Religion and American Culture (Winter, 2017) features a 53-page section on “Studying Religion in the Age of Trump,” bringing together a wide range of prominent scholars to weigh in on this contested topic. Judging by the contributions, the election of Donald Trump has upset the theories and paradigms held […]
Hispanic Protestants in the U.S. are one of the few sectors of American Christianity that continue to grow, but they are also becoming so diverse that it is difficult to make many generalizations about them, according to the new book Latino Protestants in America (Rowman and Littlefield, $38), by Mark Mulder, Aida I. Ramos, and […]
