There is a growth of baby boomers taking early retirement and entering the mission field, reports Christianity Today (February). Some of these fifty-something missionaries are signing up for a few weeks of service, while others join for several years. The missionary agency Wycliffe Associates has seen a 40 percent increase for several years in a row of […]
Religion sections fold while religion coverage grows?
Religion coverage appears to be expanding in American media at the same time that the traditional religion sections and religion editors of newspapers are being phased out. Writing in RNA Extra (January/February), the newsletter of the Religion Newswriters Association, editor Debra Mason notes that the trend of religion sections shrinking or folding has been taking place for […]
‘Radical religion’ attracts new scholarly scrutiny
Radical religious groups and trends were the focus of a newly inaugurated North American Conference on Radicalism that took place in late January at Michigan State University (East Lansing), which RW attended. Tricia Jenkins (MSU) and Virginia Thomas studied the “journey from radicalism to mainstream evangelicalism” of the Worldwide Church of God (WCG) in the years following […]
Mormon candidacy stirs new religion-politics debate
The probable candidacy of Mitt Romney for U.S. president has stirred wide–and sometimes wild–speculation about whether a Mormon could or should be elected to that office. The debate over Romney’s candidacy and its implications for American democracy has been featured prominently in the New Republic magazine. In the January 1-15 issue of that magazine, Damon Linker cites […]
On/File: January 2007
01: Several liberal religious groups and denominations in the U.S. have begun to campaign against the use of mineral water. They are critical of water privatization and consider it wrong, or even immoral, to sell a God-given resource only to those people who can afford it, while it is sometimes a scarce resource in arid, poor […]
Findings & Footnotes: January 2007
01: The anti-cult movement is paying new attention to terrorism, believing that many of its methods and concepts can apply to a wider range of religious violence. This trend is clearly seen in the current issue of theCultic Studies Journal (Vol. 5, No. 2), which is devoted to understanding terrorism through a variety of anti-cultist models. […]
New battle joined over issue of Jewish conversions in Israel
Despite passing a law allowing conversions to other Jewish branches aside from orthodoxy by those emigrating to Israel, the issue remains contested, according to recent reports. Israel’s Chief Rabbi, Shlomo Amar, is currently leading efforts for amending the legislation on conversion in such a way that a convert would not automatically be entitled to the […]
Aside from the pope, a dearth of global Christian voices?
With the exception of the current pope, there is a dearth of Christian voices on the global stage that assume to speak for Christianity in a religiously polarized world, writes Raymond de Souza in the Catholic Eyenewsletter (Nov. 30). De Souza thinks it strange that the recent visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Turkey was widely […]
Current Research: January 2007
01: There is a significant “charity gap” between religious believers and secular liberals and even secular conservatives, both in making donations and in donating their time, according to a new study. The study, published in the book Who Really Cares (Basic) by Arthur C. Brooks of Syracuse University, finds that the reason conservatives tend to be more charitable […]
Tracking secularism in a post-secular world
Secularism’s death is greatly exaggerated, but even where there is a rise of non-believers they usually don’t fall into rigid categories of “secular” and “religious.” That is one of the conclusions of a symposium on secularism in the world today in the magazine Religion in the News (Fall). Even in countries where secularism has advanced greatly, such […]
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