Religion Watch Archives

Monitoring Trends in Religion - From February 1990 to January 2016

Islamic State’s shadow looms in Asia, alarming region’s leaders

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While the Islamic State (IS) has had the most success in the Arab Islamic heartland of the Middle East, the fact that half of the world’s Muslims are in Asia has caused considerable trepidation among governments in the region, reports The Economist (June 20). The Muslims of Central Asia seem the most open to IS’s […]

Online tombs in Japan complementing but not substituting for Buddhist burial rites

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The growth of “online tombs” and other memorial sites for the dead on the Internet is not necessarily replacing traditional graves in Japan, although it is changing beliefs and practices about ancestor worship, writes Fabienne Duteil-Ogata in the Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet (No. 8, 2015). Since the 1990s, funeral practices have become […]

Findings & Footnotes: July 2015

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01: Aside from Pope Francis’ encyclical, climate change is moving on to the agendas of theologians and religion scholars. The Journal of the American Academy of Religion devotes much of its June issue to a roundtable discussion on “climate destabilization and the study of religion.” Aside from the political and social (not to mention ecological) […]

On/File: July 2015

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While the name of 57-year-old Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila had already been mentioned as a “long-shot” candidate to be pope at the 2013 conclave, his election on May 14 as the new head of Caritas Internationalis (an international confederation of Catholic charity agencies, including Catholic Relief Services) has increased the profile of this […]

Featured Story: Orthodox Judaism’s dearth of new luminaries

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At a time when Orthodox observance and yeshiva study enjoy unprecedented resurgence across the Jewish world, it is difficult to see clear successors to those (often European-educated) rabbis who defined Orthodoxy in the second half the 20th century, writes Andrew Friedman in The Jerusalem Report (June 29). In recent years, several haredi—or ultra-Orthodox—leaders have died, […]

Findings & Footnotes: June 2015

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Perfect Children: Growing Up on the Religious Fringe (Oxford University Press, $24.95), by Amanda van Eck Duymaer van Twist, sheds new light on the much-speculated subject of “second generation” members of new religious movements—including both those who have left and stayed. Van Twist, the deputy director of Inform, a London-based research center on new religious […]

New denominations for post-denominational Christianity in China?

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Churches in China are non-denominational, or “post-denominational,” according to official law which prohibits autonomous churches beyond the local congregation, but in reality there are new networks and emerging movements that are bringing back denominational differences, even if they are increasingly indigenous. Those are some of the findings of a chapter on Chinese post-denominationalism by Chloe […]

Religious scholars drafted in Egypt’s counter extremist drive

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Egypt is not the first Muslim-majority country to consider using its religious scholars in the fight against radicalized Islam, but the presence of Al-Azhar in such an effort, one of the most prestigious centers of Islamic learning, gives it particular significance. In a report in Reuters (May 31), Mahmoud Mourad and Yara Bayoumy write that […]

Clergy couples and the new clericalism in the Church of England?

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Clergy couples have become increasingly common in the Church of England, with one result being the loss of the role of vicar wives, especially in rural parishes, reports Tablet magazine (April 4). Although uncounted in the Church of England, clergy couples are estimated to be in the hundreds, with the most prominent being all three […]