American Catholics dissatisfied with the post-Vatican II modern liturgy are increasingly  moving to Eastern-Rite parishes where the liturgy closely resembles Eastern Orthodoxy, reports the New Oxford Review magazine (October). Eastern Rite Catholic parishes originated in Eastern European and  other non-Western countries that kept their own  cultural traditions and liturgies, such as icon veneration, while maintaining loyalty to the pope. There […]

New immigrants arrving in the U.S. South are changing and in some cases challenging traditional practices of churches in this region, reports the Wall Street Journal (Oct. 21). Jennifer Lee writes that “A flood of immigrants — Jamaicans, Vietnamese, Hispanics and others — are forcing new compromises in the South’s traditionally white, conservative churches. The arrivals are […]

More than such headline grabbers as the Pensacola revival, the Disney boycott, or China’s most favored nation status, the most controversial issue among evangelicals continues to center on new translations of the Bible and whether they should adjust pronoun references and other gender issues to harmonize with current usage in mainline translations and with new […]

New patterns in Jewish immigration, as well as ideological changes among Jewish intellectuals and professionals are likely to accelerate the trend of  American Jews moving to the political right, according to two reports. Moment magazine (October) reports that the large number of Russian, Syrian and Iranian and even Israeli Jews are already changing American Jewish voting patterns. […]

The massive turnout for a world  youth day with Pope John Paul II  signaled to many observers an unexpected and  growing religious hunger among French young adults for religious faith. But such yearnings appear to be far from strictly Catholic devotion, writes Alain Woodrow in The Tablet (Aug. 30), a British Catholic magazine. More than one million young people attended […]

The recent withdrawal of the Georgian Orthodox Church from the World Council of Churches has shown new faultlines in Eastern Orthodoxy, this time involving “Orthodox fundamentalism.” In an interview in the Russian Orthodox Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Office of  External Affairs (July 19), Georgian Orthodox official  Vassily Kobahidze says that the decision to withdraw from the WCC was […]

Parish nurses are becoming a fixture in American congregations, serving members medical and spiritual needs, according to Policy Review magazine (September/October). Nurses providing medical care in congregations emerged under Lutheran auspices in the mid-1980s, and since then the number of such practitioners  has swelled to more than 3,000. Most parish nurses do not provide hands-on “invasive” treatments, and […]

Several U.S. states’ experiments with “covenant marriages” and other measures to decrease divorce are finding support and reinforcement from religious groups. The Weekly Standard magazine (Sept. 29) reports that Louisiana’s recent covenant marriage act offers married couples the choice of a “high test” version of marriage; counseling is required both before marriage and divorce, and no-fault divorce […]