The recent terrorist attacks by Islamic jihadists against tourists in Kashmir and the threats by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to pursue them and their backers in Pakistan have revealed an emerging marriage between radical Islam and communism, reports the Washington Free Beacon (April 26). “Pakistan is the classic example of this nexus,” Mike Watson […]
The belief in Nigeria that there are months of the year particularly marked by demonic forces has been influenced by a combination of Pentecostal and indigenous African beliefs, writes Nduka Udeagha in the Journal of Religion in Africa (online in April). What are called the “ember months,” marking the end of the year, are associated […]
New religious movements in the Philippines are having an impact on politics, but they are also likely to feel the repercussions of this contentious election year, writes Yuchen Ma in the online journal Religions (April 7). While the Philippines is still a strongly Catholic country, new religious movements (NRMs), often based in Christianity (unlike other […]
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 […]
