The Chinese government is primarily concerned with the potential political and organizational power of religion even more than with the content of religious teachings, states Kristin Kupfer (University of Freiburg, Germany), an expert on contemporary Chinese religion and society, who spent several years in China and in 2009 completed a doctoral thesis on the Emergence […]

Zionist circles are expressing concerns that a growing number of evangelicals who were formerly committed to supporting Israel have been “changing sides” recently. Abraham Cooper and Yitzchok Adlerstein, both working at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, claim that evangelical and conservative Christians—deemed to be “Israel’s most important allies”—are increasingly targeted “for conversion from Christian Zionism to […]

Charisma magazine (January) reports on “12 global hotspots” of Christian mission and growth that includes countries not usually associated with evangelical or charismatic Christianity. Although much of the information is based on self-reporting by missionaries and church planters, the overview does at least show where charismatics see new centers of influence emerging. While China has […]

Political science has awakened “from a long, secular slumber” and started to grapple with the question of religion in politics and conflict, giving rise to competing political science approaches on these questions. This has a direct impact on suggestions about ways to solve conflicts with a religious dimension, writes Sabina A. Stein (Center for Security […]

The Jewish day school movement associated with Conservative Judaism has shown a steep decline, paralleling the membership losses suffered by the Conservative movement as a whole, reports Forward.com (January 27). The website reports that the schools, known as the Schechter Day School Network, were long considered the “crown jewel of the Conservative movement.” But since […]

Reforms enacted in the training and formation of American Catholic priests, some of which took place 20 years ago, may be responsible for the sharp decline in child abuse cases in the last decade, according to an article in the Jesuit America magazine (January 2–9). The most reliable studies that have been conducted, such as […]

Graphic novels are the latest form of popular culture and media where mysticism and the paranormal are given free reign, writes Jeffrey J. Kripal in the Chronicle of Higher Education Review (December 16). Kripal, who authored the recent book Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics and the Paranormal (University of Chicago Press), writes that […]

From the mid-1950s, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) went through a phase of re-emphasizing its distinctiveness in relation to wider American culture, but during the Hinckley era, starting in 1995, the pendulum of church culture has swung somewhat toward assimilation, writes Armand L. Mauss in an essay published in Dialogue: A […]

The growth of orthodox—and in some cases militant—forms of Islam is leading to a belated attempt to manage the new religious pluralism in Kazakhstan. A special section on religion in Kazakhstan in the the journal Central Asia and the Caucasus (Volume 12, Number 3) reports that the delicate balancing act maintained by the Kazakh leaders […]

Muslim–Coptic Christian tensions are at their height in Egypt after security forces killed 27 Copt civilians demonstrating peacefully. The October massacre at Maspero—a Cairo neighborhood—is the latest of several cases of violence and repression against Egypt’s Christian minority. The democratic revolution in Tahir Square was marked by a religious consensus, but since last spring, this […]