As its momentum has dissipated, Hillsong’s place within the Contemporary Congregational Song (CCS) industry has been irrevocably altered, writes Daniel Thornton (Alphacrucis College, NSW, Australia) in the journal Religions (March 27). For decades, Hillsong was the dominant producer of the contemporary worship music used in churches worldwide. By 2017, it had managed to become a […]
New Calvinism, known for its impact on the wider evangelical world in the early 2000s, has retreated to more internal concerns, primarily serving its own community, writes social forecaster Aaron Renn in his Substack newsletter (March 7). The movement generated a considerable number of institutions, spokesmen, and old and new media and publishing outlets compared […]
A growing number of converts to various forms of Protestantism in France come from Catholic backgrounds, reflecting broader societal shifts in religious attachment, writes Claire Bernole in the French Catholic weekly La Vie (April 3). According to an Ifop survey published in January, 25 percent of French Protestants were not born into Protestant families, with […]
Kosovo, the Muslim-majority Balkan nation, is seeing a growing trend of Muslims converting to Catholicism, reports Sonia Sarkar in Religion Unplugged (March 17). She writes that a group called the Decanski Movement Association has been promoting the voluntary exit from Islam, while also seeking to preserve Albanian national identity and values under the motto: “We […]
The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria has left behind a fractured country and an increasingly divisive politics that raises new concerns about the safety of Christians and also the Alawite minority, the heterodox branch of Shia Islam espoused by the Assad family, according to two reports. In The Dispatch (March 16), Michael Reneau, […]
If there is a spiritual ethic of wealth today that is spreading beyond elites and the upper class, it would probably be the bohemian hedonism and spirituality of the psychedelic renaissance, writes Jules Evans in the Substack newsletter Ecstatic Integration (February 8). Evans reports on “the out-sized role played by a handful of very wealthy […]
Rather than showing either continued religious revival or straightforward secularization, Arab Muslim societies from 2010 to 2022 exhibited trends toward religious polarization, since both highly religious and non-religious populations grew simultaneously at the expense of moderately religious individuals, with significant variations across countries, demographics, and time periods. In a study reported in the International Journal […]
While never very large in number, new religious movements in Israel are becoming more accepted by the general public due to these movements’ acceptance of Zionist ideology and involvement in the country’s settlement ethos and military, as well as their emphasis on education and success. Writing in the journal Politics and Religion (online in February), […]
Congregations, especially in the New York City area, are playing a key role in preserving and protecting languages from around the world, many of which may be in danger of extinction, writes Emily Belz in Christianity Today (January/February). Linguists led by Ross Perlin of Columbia University have identified 700 languages in New York City, which […]
While Jewish Canadians have benefitted from Canada’s multicultural ideology and policy, they are facing growing anti-Semitism and a lack of acceptance in the country, writes Robert Brym of the University of Toronto in the social science journal Society (online in January). Especially since the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023, Muslim immigrants and Jews have […]
