01: American confidence in religious institutions is at a 30-year low, down to 45 percent, according to a recent Gallup Poll. The annual Gallup Poll on confidence in institutions reveal that while the Protestant confidence rate of 59 percent is about the same as a year ago, Catholic trust dropped to 42 percent. Although this year’s […]
Evangelicals and Catholics sharing ministries
The closer relations between American evangelicals and Roman Catholics that have developed in the last few years appear to be entering a new stage that involve joint evangelism and ministry projects, according to America magazine (July 15-22). Evangelical-Catholic relations have been strengthened through coalitions on social issues (such as abortion) and joint statements on doctrine and practice […]
Funding religious scholarship — sometimes with agendas
In recent years, charitable foundations have played a large role in both spurring research and supporting ministries in American religion. Both conservative and liberal religious groups are at the receiving end of generous donors who might have different and sometimes conflicting religious outlooks and ideological goals. Christianity Today (July 12) reports that a primary factor in the resurgence […]
Findings & Footnotes: July 2002
01: There will likely be a wave of new books coming out on the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church in the next few months. Two recent works suggest that the scandals often relate to other issues in Catholicism. Betrayal: The Crisis In The Catholic Church (Little, Brown and Co, $23.95) by the investigative staff of the […]
Serbian Orthodoxy takes ecumenical, interfaith turn
The Serbian Orthodox Church is attempting to shed its past image as a stronghold of nationalism and foster interfaith and ecumenical dialogue. At a mid-June New York conference RW attended, Boris Milosavljevic, Yugoslavian Deputy Secretary of Religious Affairs, and Metropolitan Amfilohije of Montanegro and the Littoral spoke of plans to hold an interfaith conference next year that would […]
Islam wins converts in Chiapas, Mexico
Some 300 Mexican Indians have converted to Islam in Chiapas in the southern part of the country since 1995. Fifteen of them have already made the pilgrimage to Mecca last November, reports Inter Press Service (June 18). Those conversions are the result of missionary efforts launched by Spanish members of the Murabitun (http://www.murabitun.org), a sometimes controversial group […]
Christian internet thriving around the Baltic Sea
The strong Internet presence of the Lutheran Church in Estonia as well as in Finland, two countries on the shores of the Baltic Sea, came as a surprise to RW during the ECIC’s conference. In Estonia, 20 percent of the population connects to the Internet at least once a week. The country is far ahead of the […]
Christian internet expands in Europe
Around the mid-1990s, members of Protestant and Catholic Churches in several European countries began to pay attention to the Internet. Since then, the growth of interest and involvement has been rapid. For instance, there are today no less than 6,200 Catholic websites in Italy, Fr. Franco Mazza, web coordinator of the Conference of Italian bishops, […]
Current Research: July 2002
01: Close to two-thirds of bishops have allowed priests accused of sexual abuse to keep working, “a practice that spans the decades and continues today,” reports the Dallas Morning News (June 12). A three-month study conducted by the newspaper, which involved studying the records of the top leaders in each of the nation’s dioceses, found that at least […]
Declining ecumenism facing new challenges
There doesn’t seem to be any sign that ecumenism will recover from its doldrums, particularly as interfaith relations and a concern for coexistence now outweigh the drive for church unity among most denominations. In an article in Ecumenical Trends magazine (June), Lutheran ecumenist William G. Rusch offers the above prognosis on ecumenism, noting that a long term decline […]
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