■ An article published in late May on the LinkedIn social network, as reported by journalist Loup Besmond de Senneville in La Croix International (June 30), proposes that the Roman Catholic Church could contribute to the development of an integral security paradigm for governing cybersecurity. The article, written by four Catholic computer experts (two of them employed by the Roman Curia), argues that the Catholic Church is not immune to cyber threats at various levels and that weaknesses in the Vatican’s digital infrastructure should not be ignored. A number of cyber attacks have been reported in recent years, such as the one targeting the Holy See’s diplomatic network in 2020, which led to suspicions about China being behind the attack and the Holy See’s diplomats being instructed to process the most sensitive information on paper only. Other incidents have taken place in the context of the war in Ukraine. The group of experts pleads for an approach that should benefit both the church by protecting the Vatican’s digital assets and mankind as part of the church’s multilevel dialogue with the world.
Source: https://churchexecutive.com/archives/cyber-exposures-in-the-church
Speaking on their own, the authors advocate a “Vatican Cybersecurity Authority” staffed with experts that could contribute to global thinking on the subject. Since “cybersecurity has become a critical issue in today’s digital age,” the church as a universal institution is called “to intervene in human history [by] enriching the present with good” and approach the cyber realm as a way to promote “authentic development and long-lasting peace”—not forgetting that “the internet is already home to many Catholic platforms that are irreplaceable tools as a means of evangelization.” Seeing the challenges of cybersecurity as illustrations of an interconnected world, the group of experts submits such a project as a continuation of Catholic Social Thinking by “providing pragmatic views that can help actors across diverse sectors and nations to navigate the challenges of a uniquely complex digital age.” The article can be downloaded from: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cyber-commons-humankind-chuck-brooks/
■ The evangelical quarterly China Source (June 12) devotes its current issue to the Pentecostal situation in China amidst growing government restrictions and crackdowns. The Pentecostal revival in China has spread through missionary efforts as well as indigenous churches, pastors, and evangelists, most notably the underground house churches. Several articles are authored by charismatic and Pentecostal practitioners, especially church planters belonging to the “big five” networks in China: China for Christ, China Gospel Fellowship, Yinshang Church, Lixin Church, and Word of Life. But the rapid growth of these church planting networks and congregations during the past 15 years has slowed considerably with the enactment of new religious regulations in 2018. Many churches have been shut down and almost all missionaries forced out of the country.
The recent wave of persecution has “diminished the church in terms of its size, social influence, outreach ministries, and even its global vision,” writes Dennis Balcombe. The overwhelming majority of Christians in China remain Pentecostal or charismatic (though many go by the name “evangelical” to avoid further problems with the government), but the Covid pandemic added another stressor to these churches. Some congregations in the largest underground church network, China Gospel Fellowship, lost between 30 to 40 percent of their members, with other networks reporting similar losses. What is called “house church model 3.0,” where members meet in each other’s homes but are also linked electronically to other home churches, has shown signs of growth post-Covid. This issue can be downloaded at:
https://www.chinasource.org/resource-library/articles/pentecost-in-china-2/
■ A special issue of the Serbian journal Politics and Religion (17:1) highlights the Taliban’s unique hybrid political and religious identity as the key to understanding how it has endured after so many challenges, including the U.S. occupation and withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Last year’s strike against Al-Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan, where he was under the protection of the Taliban, indicated that the group had maintained its terrorist alliances despite its claims to the contrary. Several articles in the issue look at the continuing pattern of militance and support for terrorism in the Taliban by comparing it to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. Unlike these groups, the Taliban does not have a radical Islamic vision or ideology but rather a consistent strategy of Pashtun supremacy and forming strategic alliances with radical Islamic groups to consolidate its rule in Afghanistan. But its routing of two superpowers (the Soviet Union and the U.S.) has also led Taliban leaders to see themselves as emerging leaders of world Islam. An article by Ahmad Shayeq Qassem concludes that the difficulty in understanding and predicting the Taliban’s actions stems from the fact that it combines a “self-contradictory outcome” of radicalized religion, organized crime (through narcotic trafficking), ethno-nationalist hegemony, and longstanding tensions in Afghan-Pakistani relations. The issue can be downloaded at: https://www.politicsandreligionjournal.com/index.php/prj/issue/view/33
■ The current issue of the journal Religion (April) looks at the relation of contemporary Sufism to different forms of universalism. Francesco Piraino of Ca’ Foscari University (Venice, Italy) identifies the existence of a discourse that can be defined as “Islamic humanism,” partly overlapping with other expressions of universalism but also distinct from the others. He defines a religious universalist discourse “as the conceptualization of otherness in religious terms, which overcomes boundaries and proposes inclusive narratives.” It implies both exclusivist and universalist dimensions, leading to different (and necessarily unachieved) types of universalism. In contemporary Sufism, one can identify three main types of universalist discourses: Traditionalist, New Age, and neoliberal. The first type, influenced by the understanding of a “primordial tradition” as it was developed by René Guénon (1886–1951), is anti-modernist and engages in interfaith dialogue with institutional religions. In contrast, New Age Sufism is anti-institutional, seeing sacred truth as scattered and present in a range of religious and secular phenomena, and reconfiguring gender roles. “Neoliberal” Sufism (or “moderate” Islam) accepts Western modernity, calling for religious pluralism and sacralizing a free market economy and democracy.
Studying two Sufi orders originating in Northern Africa, the Budshishiyya and the Alawiyya, Piraino notes that their universalist discourse challenges some mainstream Sufi understandings while not being identified with either of the three aforementioned types. It should be noted that “humanism” is here an emic category used by representatives of both groups. They see human beings as stewards of creation. They are both involved in local and international interfaith dialogue. They are not averse to mixing Islamic hermeneutics with human and social sciences. They emphasize responsibility towards society and encourage socio-political engagement. At the same time, their Islamic humanism remains a religious discourse “rather than a reformist project or a specific ideology.” Both groups have partly different ways of approaching it—it is not made part of the spiritual path for the Budshishiyya. And there are also debates within and around those organizations on those issues. Piraino explains that Islamic humanist discourse “expresses the centrality of the human being within the frame of a divine project.” There are similarities with the other contemporary Sufi universalist discourses, but differences as well. Acknowledging the diversity of Islamic discourses, Piraino points out, challenges simplistic dichotomies often present in approaches to contemporary Islam. For more information on this article, visit: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rrel20
