1) The After Party is seeking to become a leading publishing program to counteract the influence of Donald Trump and political polarization among evangelicals. Led by Duke Divinity consulting professor Curtis Chang, head of the program’s founding organization Redeeming Babel, and developed with two prominent “never-Trump” evangelicals, the New York Times columnist David French and […]
Romana Didulo, the self-proclaimed “Queen of Canada” has been among the most successful in starting a new religion based on QAnon conspiracies. Using Theosophical ideas found in earlier new religious movements, such as the I AM and the Church Universal and Triumphant movements, Didulo, who is almost 50 years old and originally from the Philippines, […]
While artificial intelligence (AI) has been imputed with spiritual, even mystical, power by its proponents and critics, Way of the Future is among the first organized religions based on the technology. The church was originally launched by Anthony Levandowski in 2015, while he was working on the self-driving technology Waymo for Google. Levandowski envisioned a […]
1) Vietnamese-American Catholics have become a source of vocational growth and vitality in the American church and the Vietnamese Eucharistic Youth Movement (VEYM) has served as their nerve center. While Vietnamese Americans make up only 1 to 2 percent of the American Catholic population, they represent 12 percent of seminarians. The VEYM has 136 chapters, […]
1) This summer, the film Sound of Freedom found both a worldwide audience and a place in the culture wars because of its religious and political associations. At the box office, the movie actually beat the supposed summer blockbusters, the final farewell to the “Indiana Jones” character and another installment of the “Mission Impossible” series, […]
1) Marcos Witt has emerged as a key Latino evangelical figure in the U.S., both for his praise and worship music and, more recently, his evangelism and social action, particularly through his AOA or America Ora Adora (America Prays and Adores) tour. The 61-year-old Witt may no longer be the most popular worship leader among […]
1) From its founding in 2006, the Moishe House movement has expanded considerably in building a sense of community among Jewish young adults. Moishe Houses started in order to meet the needs of young Jews who wanted to more actively engage in the Jewish community and were too old for Jewish life on campus and […]
The first-ever national House of Worship in the Bahá’í world was dedicated in late March on the outskirts of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its design is “inspired by traditional artworks, structures and natural features of the DRC, as well as by the Bahá’í sacred teachings.” The Bahá’í Mother Temple for Africa […]
1) The United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) inauguration of the Abrahamic Family House (AFH) in Abu Dhabi in early February represents the first interfaith worship center in the Middle East. The center includes a church, mosque and synagogue, all within close proximity to each other to encourage religious dialogue and co-existence. The establishment of the Abrahamic […]
The Engaged Spirituality Project encourages journalists covering religion to adopt ethnographic methods to convey a more in-depth and fine-grained account of religion for their readers. The project, run by the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California, brings together social scientists—including a core of ethnographers—and journalists to identify, interview, contextualize, […]
