More non-affiliated Americans have been seeking spiritual directors even as they lose faith in other aspects of institutional religion, reports Deirdre Pelphrey in World Religion News (August 12). Spiritual directors have seen increased interest in their ministries, especially from “younger people who no longer attend church but still want to nurture a sense of the […]
Vacation Bible schools, which function as day camps that churches provide for members and the community, are adapting to changing dynamics of family life and religious participation, particularly a decline in volunteering for vacation Bible school ministries, according to a report from National Public Radio (August 4). Jason DeRose reports that rather than recruiting volunteers […]
Ukraine’s new law prohibiting the Russian Orthodox Church’s (ROC) activity in the country, as well as that of other religious organizations linked with Russia, is a sign of the increasing securitization of relations between state and religion in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, writes Dmytro Vovk (Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University, Ukraine) in the Nachrichtendienst Östliche […]
The Neo-Zoroastrian religiosity of converts has often been described as different from traditional Zoroastrian practices, but changes are also being observed among those who are Zoroastrian by birth. In a new issue of Entangled Religions (August) on “Religious Conversion in a Religiously Plural World,” Benedikt Römer (Bundeswehr University, Munich) reports that aspects of coalescence can […]
Controversy and hostility toward new religious movements (NRMs), particularly the Unification Church, are being fanned by the media in Japan, which has focused attention on second-generation members who have left and protested against these groups, according to Adam Lyons of the University of Montreal. In a paper presented at the early-August meeting of the Association […]
While religious communities are often thought to be resources for the integration of migrants, the opposite can also be true, as Helmar Kurz (University of Muenster, Germany) writes in an article in the International Journal of Latin American Religions (June) based on his research on the role of Brazilian Spiritist centers in Germany for migrants. […]
Following an administrative decision in June by the Minister of Justice of the Democratic Republic of the Congo intended to regulate the proliferation of evangelical churches in large Congolese cities, many of those churches suddenly find themselves in an irregular situation, reports William Minh Hào Nguyen in La Croix International (July 26). Revival churches stemming […]
Japanese youth culture is shifting from embracing spiritual and self-empowerment to stressing a “weak self,” which includes invoking and having relationships with self-created sentient beings, Satoko Fujiwara and Hiroki Miura report in the journal Social Compass (71:2). In analyzing popular youth culture, particularly pop songs, anime, and online sites, especially X, they find references to […]
Although a group of Tibetan Buddhist nuns received full ordination in 2022, breaking with centuries of monastic tradition, the practice continues to be resisted by Tibetan clergy, writes Vicki Mackenzie in the Buddhist magazine Tricycle (Summer). Hosted and initiated by the royal family in Bhutan, 144 women became the first-ever Tibetan nuns to receive full […]
Nudism may be declining on an organizational level, but new spiritual techniques and meanings are becoming attached to the practice, Rowan Pelling reports in the online magazine UnHerd (June 24). The nudist ethos grew out of the German Lebensreform movement, which challenged the destruction wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Yet the German Association for Free […]
