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Monitoring Trends in Religion - From February 1990 to January 2016

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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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Canterbury’s charismatic and managerial turn

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The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby is leading the world Anglican communion through a combination of charismatic-personal authority and managerial culture that departs from the more traditional leadership styles of his predecessors, writes Oxford University theologian Martyn Percy in the Journal of Anglican Studies (online May). Percy credits Welby as managing to avoid the gridlock […]

Current Research: June 2015

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01: The recent Pew Religious Landscape Survey has received wide publicity for its findings on the decline of Christians and the growth of the unaffiliated, but the study’s figures on the growth of non-Christian religions are also noteworthy if more complex. According to Pew, Hinduism is now tied with Buddhism as the country’s fourth-largest religion, […]

Catholic men’s ministries expanding, taking ‘militant’ turn

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Men’s ministries in American Catholicism are multiplying and inspiring fervent devotion and even activism, writes Dwight Longnecker on the Catholic news website Crux (May 27). At the turn of the millennium there were 16 Catholic men’s conferences; today there are more than 100 nationwide. The renewal of Catholic men’s ministries is also taking place at […]