Religion Watch Archives

Monitoring Trends in Religion - From February 1990 to January 2016

Featured Story: Religious organizations face losses and lessons from fraud

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Some U.S. $50 billion will likely be stolen from money given by Christians to churches, parachurch organizations and secular organizations around the world in 2015. Fraud is exploiting the trust that exists within a religious community, and with the constant development of new groups, networks and movements, financial accountability will continue to represent a constant […]

Featured Story: God-friendly Buddhists seek to engage Muslims

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A new approach in Buddhist-Muslim relations and dialogue is for the Buddhist participants to discuss their equivalent of God in order to relate to Islam on a doctrinal level, writes Kieko Obuse in the journal Numen (62). The trend is not coming from those societies facing Muslim-Buddhist conflict and even violence, such as Sri Lanka, […]

Polling problems pose new challenges in understanding today’s religion

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Religious polling is facing the same loss of confidence from the public and other problems as polling in general, but surveys on religion may face particular challenges, writes sociologist Robert Wuthnow in First Things magazine (Aug./Sept.). In an article adapted from his forthcoming book on religion and polling, Wuthnow writes that religion polling’s use of […]

New women-based prayer rituals gain pan-Jewish popularity in Israel and beyond

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Rituals known as “amen ceremonies,” which involve group prayer and sharing of personal stories, needs and alleged miracles, have caught on among both observant and non-observant women in Israel and more recently Europe and the U.S., writes Rivka Neriya-Ben Shahar in the journal Contemporary Jewry (July). Amen ceremonies consist of women sitting in a circle, […]

Current Research: August 2015

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01: There is still a Presbyterian (or Calvinist) difference at work in the way that these Christians show high levels of optimism, volunteering, happiness and generalized trust, writes William Weston in the social science journal Society (July/August). Weston analyzes recent data from the Presbyterian Panel comparing them with the results of the General Social Survey […]

Reformed Christianity finds growing appeal in China

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Both Reformed (or Calvinistic) theology and church practice are finding growing appeal among Christians in China, reports Paul Peng in China Source (June 26), an online evangelical Chinese newsletter. Peng writes that Reformed thought has becoming increasingly influential among Chinese Christians, largely due to the translation of Reformed literature into Chinese and the evangelistic and […]

Megachurches’ future may be brightest outside US

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Megachurches abroad now have the higher average attendance in the world, even though the vast majority of megachurches are still in the United States, reports the Washington Post (July 24). While there are 230 to 500 such churches elsewhere in the world, the Hartford Institute estimates that there are about three times more megachurches in […]

‘Back to Judaism’ in Indonesia

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Beside a handful of native-born Jews residing in Indonesia, seventy-seven Indonesians have officially converted, while 200 more are on their way to conversion, reports photographer Anna Clare Spelman, who documents Jewish migration to Asia, in Jerusalem Report (July 13). Scattered around islands of Indonesia, there are reported to be people of Jewish-Dutch heritage — since […]