The recent withdrawal of the Georgian Orthodox Church from the World Council of Churches has shown new faultlines in Eastern Orthodoxy, this time involving “Orthodox fundamentalism.” In an interview in the Russian Orthodox Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Office of  External Affairs (July 19), Georgian Orthodox official  Vassily Kobahidze says that the decision to withdraw from the WCC was […]

Parish nurses are becoming a fixture in American congregations, serving members medical and spiritual needs, according to Policy Review magazine (September/October). Nurses providing medical care in congregations emerged under Lutheran auspices in the mid-1980s, and since then the number of such practitioners  has swelled to more than 3,000. Most parish nurses do not provide hands-on “invasive” treatments, and […]

Several U.S. states’ experiments with “covenant marriages” and other measures to decrease divorce are finding support and reinforcement from religious groups. The Weekly Standard magazine (Sept. 29) reports that Louisiana’s recent covenant marriage act offers married couples the choice of a “high test” version of marriage; counseling is required both before marriage and divorce, and no-fault divorce […]

The Unification Church is downplaying membership in its church and is upholding a more broadly based movement that focuses on giving “blessings” to families and recognizing Sun Myung Moon and Mrs. Moon as “true parents,” according to recent articles. Yoshihiko Joshua Masuda, a theologian from the Unification Church’s Sun Moon University in South Korea, sees […]

The Christian men’s organization Promise Keepers has been hailed as the most vibrant expression of evangelical Christianity today, but there are indications that the movement may be peaking in its influence, according to observers. At the annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion in Toronto last summer, Wheaton College sociologist James Mathieson noted […]

Missionaries and mission fields are changing to the point where it sometimes appears difficult to tell one from the other. Such challenges as the resurgence of Islam and the loss of Western missionary dominance is radically changing the  the traditional face of mission work, according to several reports. A recent major missionary conference provided a vivid […]

A new breed of “intellectual convert is helping to reshape Islam across the Arab and Muslim world. An Associated Press report (July 7) notes that a new generation of  Muslims have turned to the faith from Marxism, who are “more adept at post-modernism than the sayings of the prophet Mohammed. They speak English and French, are versed in […]

Despite the end of the war in Bosnia, nationalism continues to be an influential force among the religions in the former Yugoslavia, reports the New York Times (July 20). During the beginning of the conflict, nationalism “came from the top down,” as leaders generated nationalistic fervor among the Croats, Serbs and Bosnians. After  four years of  war and propaganda, […]

At the early August meeting of the  Association for the Sociology of Religion meeting in Toronto that RW attended, there was a special session on the differences between  religion in Canada and the U.S. Specialists documented how the mainline churches have decreased faster and the evangelicals have grown slower in Canada than in the U.S. Sociologist Reginald Bibby  suggested that […]

African missionaries are increasingly planting churches in the U.S., and are attracting a multicultural following in the process, reports the Christian Century magazine (Aug. 13-20). The movement of African churches to the African nationals (and Caribbean residents) in Europe, especially in Britain [see January RW], but the trend in the U.S. seems to be less about race and […]