Taizé, an ecumenical monastic community in France with a worldwide following of young Christians, has changed in recent years, addressing issues surrounding immigration in Europe, the pandemic, and clerical sex abuse, reports Stephanie Saldana in the Jesuit magazine America (February). Taizé was started during World War II by Protestants seeking the monastic life and church […]
Canada’s trucker protests over vaccine mandates suggest a degree of religious influence, though it carries as much American as Canadian inspiration, reports the National Review magazine (February 14). Nate Hochman writes that “As more protesters flock to the Ottawa trucker convoy to protest Canada’s pandemic restrictions, the movement has taken on an explicitly Christian tone. […]
The commitment of Christian Democrat political figures had been central to Europe’s reconstruction process after World War II, but religion has again become a topic for the European Union (EU) over the past 20 years, due to concerns about both radical Islam and the use of religious themes by populist political movements. These issues are […]
Throughout Armenian history, even when many Armenians were dispersed and no longer had their own state, the Armenian Apostolic Church has played a key role as a national church. However, according to Matthieu Barlet of the Observatoire Pharos, a French think tank monitoring religious and cultural trends around the world, the linkage between Armenian identity […]
With much of the West’s attention fixated on Russia and Ukraine, the political influence of Islam shows signs of both decline and resurgence. In the scholarly newsletter Quillette (January 21), Imran Said reports that Islamist governments, “once seen as an unstoppable force throughout most of the Muslim world,” are now seen as being incapable of […]
The Covid pandemic has “accelerated people’s comings and goings and has required new strategies to welcome and assimilate new members into the church community,” writes Melissa Morgan Kelley in Christianity Today (January 18). Along with other life changes wrought by Covid, for “those who were already struggling with their church, the pandemic served as a […]
The recent growth of anti-Semitic incidents, most vividly seen in early January’s hostage crisis at a Texas synagogue, is most threatening to Jews who are religiously observant, writes Mark Oppenheimer in the Wall Street Journal (January 19). He notes that most of the recent attacks against Jews, which also include the shootings at a synagogue […]
The blog of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture (January 13), which offers an annual forecast for the upcoming year, is predicting for 2022 such “megatrends” as a turn to authoritarian government and religion and a virtual reality-based “metaverse,” where online “spiritual experience entrepreneurs” will seek to usurp the role of in-person and lived […]
Muslim organizations in the U.S., Canada, and the UK are becoming increasingly outspoken advocates for Uyghur Muslims, who are suffering genocide under the Chinese government, according to Axios (January 2). While the governments of many Muslim-majority countries have faced criticism for their non-involvement and silence about China’s repression of their co-religionists, Muslim laypeople have been organizing and […]
While two-thirds of Canadians report a religious affiliation, this is the first time that the proportion has dropped below 70 percent, reports Ashleigh Stewart in a three-part series on religious transformations in Canada published by Global News (January 8–16). Some religious leaders are hopeful, though, that shifts forced by the pandemic have opened new ways […]
