Religion Watch Archives

Monitoring Trends in Religion - From February 1990 to January 2016

On/File: March 2015

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01: Endowed with a powerful voice, Ahmet Muhsin Tuzer is an unusual full-time imam because he is also an active part-time singer in a rock band, wears jeans, sports long hair and rides a Kawasaki motorcycle. He has been performing with his Firock band since 2010 and has become a celebrity, although conservative Muslims denounce rock […]

Featured Story: Alcoholics Anonymous caught between ‘secularizers’ and ‘fundamentalists’

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Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is showing growing conflict and diversity over the role and meaning of spirituality in its meetings, although the organization is likely to hold together, write psychologists Ernest Kurtz and William White in the current issue of the online journal Religions (No. 6, 2015). In the last few years there have been feuds […]

Online ordinations put to unconventional spiritual uses

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Online ordinations groups, such as the Universal Life Church (ULC), are branching out from mainly offering the public “priests for the day” for friends and family members’ weddings to appealing to more serious spiritual entrepreneurs seeking a license for their unconventional ministries, writes Heather Adams in the Washington Post (Jan. 13).  The ULC and related […]

Adventists’ evangelical temptation

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There is a growing clash in Seventh Day Adventism between those who want to move closer to evangelicals in worship style and shared beliefs and those pressing for maintaining Adventist identity, reports Christianity Today (January/February). For more than a decade, there has been a movement of Adventists toward contemporary evangelical worship styles and closer cooperation […]

Church constructions decline but not necessarily church planting

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While church construction has fallen 80 percent since 2002, now down to its lowest level since record keeping began in 1967, new congregations are being established at a rapid rate, reports the Wall Street Journal (Jan. 15). Rob Moll reports that the $3.15 billion spent in the construction of religious buildings is half the level […]

Current Research: February 2015

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01: The conflict between religion and science in the U.S. is often portrayed as being between conservative believers and secular Americans but a recent study finds that a “post-secular” camp who tend to view both science and religion favorably. The study, conducted by Timothy L. O’Brien and Shiri Noy and published in the American Sociological […]

The ‘motherteresafication’ of Albania?

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Mother Teresa has become a national symbol of Albania, even though it is a Muslim dominant and secular nation, writes Cecilie Endresen in the journal Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations (26:1). Since her beatification in 2003, Mother Teresa has been embraced by Albania’s ruling party as a national symbol, with her name, statues and portraits appearing […]

German-speaking atheists more organized, visible

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While the number of people belonging to atheist and other secularist organizations remains low in Germany and Austria, representatives of atheist views have managed to gain more media attention in recent years, and atheism is on the rise, according to the current issue of Weltanschauungen – Texte zur religiösen Vielfalt (No. 101), a Catholic publication […]

Interfaith groups growing, seeking direction in UK

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The last 15 years have seen a burgeoning of interfaith organizations in the UK, writes Abdul-Azim Ahmed, a UK-based researcher on contemporary Islam in Britain in On Religion (Winter 2015), a new independent magazine on religion and society. According to Ahmed, there are today “hundreds” of interfaith organizations in Britain. Some of the early interfaith […]

Baltic Lutheranism faces challenges inside and out

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In comparison with Lutheran Churches in Germany and Scandinavia, the Lutheran Churches in the Baltic States have become more conservative, and those in Latvia and Lithuania moved closer to the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS), writes Priit Rohtmets (University of Tartu, Estonia) in Religion & Gesellschaft in Ost und West (January). Both in Estonia and Latvia, […]