“Quiet rooms” established in public institutions in Scandinavia to accommodate religions in increasingly pluralistic and secular societies have taken on more private uses, revealing a shift from collective religion to a more individualistic spirituality, according to a study published in the journal Sociology of Religion (Online in August). A team of researchers studied these “rooms of […]
Not only have recent Salafist political projects failed to materialize, but Salafis themselves are gaining less of a hearing and less influence among Muslims in a wide range of Islamic countries and contexts, write Muhammad Sani Umar and Mark Woodward in the journal Contemporary Islam (online August). While the campaigns of jihadic Salafist coalitions in Iraq, […]
The quasi-Christian group, the Church of Almighty God (CAG), has become the most outlawed religion in China, while its members face obstacles in gaining asylum in the West, according to one presentation at a session on the movement that was held at this year’s conference of the Association for the Sociology of Religion in New […]
The phenomenon of the non-affiliated or “nones” has been prodded and probed from every available angle, although most often by social scientists and religious professionals concerned about what the rising tide of nones means for the future of institutional religion. Public Discourse, the electronic weekly newsletter of the conservative Witherspoon Institute, devoted its August 18 […]
1. Charis, short for the Catholic Charismatic Renewal International Service, is the new office for charismatic renewal in the Catholic Church established by Pope Francis to coordinate this often unwieldy movement and bring it more into line with his papacy’s emphases on ecumenism and social justice. The charismatic movement had formerly had two liaison offices […]
At a conference better known for holding forth on the steady advance of secularization in much of Europe, it was striking how many of the papers at this year’s meeting of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion in Barcelona showed the growing political influence of religious groups and discourse on the continent. In […]
After more than fifty years of existence, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal’s (CCR) influence is now spreading in the Catholic Church through groups that are adopting some Charismatic practices while not wanting to be identified as Charismatics, writes Valérie Aubourg (Catholic University of Lyon) in Social Compass (June). Based on her research in France, Aubourg distinguishes […]
There has been a significant decline in religious freedom from just a decade ago, a trend which may adversely affect economic growth, according to an analysis by the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation (RFBF). A just-released Pew Research study found that governments in 52 out of 198 countries and territories had high or very high […]
Quebec has moved toward a strong form of secularism, known as laïcité, that challenges the growth of religious pluralism and of Islam in the province, reports Michael Higgins in Commonweal magazine (July 9). In June the National Assembly in Quebec City passed Bill 21, a law seeking to address the challenges of religious pluralism. The […]
The desire to dissociate Polish identity from a Catholic version of it forcefully promoted by the church has led a number of non-Jewish Poles to support the renewal of Jewish culture, according to Geneviève Zubrzycki (University of Michigan) at the International Society for the Sociology of Religion conference in Barcelona that RW attended. The kind […]
