While “yoga and the spiritual ideals for which it stands, have become the ultimate commodity,” costing practitioners increasing sums of money, there is a backlash against the big business aspect of the practice, reports the New York Times (April 25). While the numbers practicing yoga may actually be decreasing, according to a survey commissioned by […]

As with broadcasting and print media, evangelical Christians have been among the religious groups most strongly investing in the new media. Charisma magazine (May) highlights some of these innovations, noting how evangelical technological entrepreneurship parallels and in some cases influences new media developments. These include evangelism efforts, such as LifeChurch.tv (the largest Internet-based church with […]

When Charisma magazine (May) recently asked 20 charismatic Christian leaders about their “vision” of life for the church for the next 10 years, there was a marked lack of optimism about the position of evangelical Christianity in America, although there was less negativity about the future of non-Western societies. No one ruled out revival breaking […]

As in other areas of American church life, the rise of megachurches is challenging older patterns of world missions and, in the process, raising questions about which party—the megachurch or the mission field— is benefitting from these new changes. In the International Bulletin of Missionary Research (April), Robert Priest, Douglas Wilson and Adelle Johnson present […]

The unprecedented rapid growth and dispersal of Amish communities throughout the U.S. is leading observers to ask whether this American religious tradition can hold together and retain its identity. A report on the growth of new Amish communities in the Mennonite Quarterly Review (April) notes that while there has always been growth of new settlements, […]

In the context of speculations about a “holy alliance” between the Roman Catholic Church and the Moscow Patriarchate around common ethical concerns and in reaction to secularizing tendencies in Europe, journalists FrançoisXavier Maigre and Nicolas Senèze have attempted to summarize current challenges for the Orthodox Church worldwide in the French Catholic daily La Croix (Feb. […]

The landlocked South Asian country Nepal is going through a bumpy transition from being the world’s only Hindu kingdom to a secular republic. In Nepalnews.com, Sijan Raj Baral, a Fulbright Fellow at Kent State University, Ohio, writes that support for the restoration of Hinduism as the state religion has suddenly grown. In April 2006, Nepal […]

A few years ago, it was unusual for newspapers on the European continent to publish articles on creationism, except when reporting about North America. In recent years, however, there has been an increase in reports on creationist activities in Europe too. The Swiss weekly L’Hebdo (Feb. 4) has attempted to document the impact of creationist […]

The tendency of prestigious American universities to have large and strong evangelical campus ministries is also the case outside the U.S., particularly in university contexts that represent a challenge to conservative Christians, writes Edward Dutton in the Chronicle Review (March 12), the weekly magazine of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Dutton found burgeoning evangelical campus […]