Recently on what has been described by followers as his last world tour, the founder of the Unification Church and of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (among many other organizations), Rev. Sun Myung Moon, is also seizing this opportunity for claiming that God’s Kingdom is coming soon, a message he proclaimed during […]

01: RadicalisationResearch.org seeks to provide policymakers and anyone else whose work uses concepts such as radicalization, fundamentalism or extremism with easy access to high-quality academic research on these controversial issues. By taking a non-partisan approach and providing access to the best and latest research, the website hopes to “challenge ungrounded assumption that may obscure a […]

There is a pressing need for priests to provide services to Orthodox Chinese faithful, said Metropolitan Hilarion, head of the External Church Relations Department of the Moscow Patriarchate (Interfax, March 16). There are up to 15,000 Chinese Orthodox, but the only two Chinese priests are more than 80 years old. In some cases, the Chinese […]

In Russian-controlled North Caucasus, the policy of the federal government to promote religious leaders who would support its policies, regardless of qualifications and reputation, is increasingly seen as backfiring, writes Valery Dzutsev in the March 25 issue of North Caucasus Weekly, a newsletter published by the U.S.-based, conservative Jamestown Foundation. The muftis of Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachaevo-Cherkessia […]

While the practice of kidnapping members of controversial religious movements for the purpose of “deprogramming” them has virtually disappeared from Europe and North America, cases continue to be reported in Japan, said Dan Fefferman, president of the International Coalition for Religious Freedom (a Unification Church-funded organization), at a session of the European Leadership Conference (a […]

Iran is not likely to follow other Muslim nations in undergoing revolutions that allow Islam to retain a role in national affairs. It is more likely that any movement to revolt against the Iranian regime will be more secular than religious, writes sociologist Ahmad Sadri. In the e-newsletter Sightings (March 3), Sadri writes that because […]

Inside Israel (March), an evangelical newsletter on Israeli affairs, reports that there is increasing sympathy among European Jews with the prospect of leaving the continent with the rise of anti-Semitism. The newsletter quotes prominent Dutch politician and former EU commissioner Wits Bolkestein as expressing his concern for the future of Orthodox Jews in the Netherlands, […]

Conservative Judaism has been in sharp decline since 2001 and other liberal Jewish bodies are organizing and strategizing to address their own declining memberships, reports the Jewish newspaper Forward (February 18). A draft of a strategic plan by the denomination reveals that there has been a 14 percent decline in Conservative membership in the last […]

The largest non-ethnic Orthodox church body in the U.S., the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), is facing a growing traditionalist-fundamentalist element as well as an attempt to steer the communion in the direction of Russian Orthodoxy. In his blog Religion and Other Curiosities (March 2 entry), sociologist Peter Berger reports on what he calls “the […]

The Legionaries of Christ, an influential conservative Catholic religious and lay order, may have difficulty rehabilitating itself after its recently deceased founder was revealed to have left a long trail of sexual abuse and corruption behind him. The dilemmas of replacing a charismatic leader is compounded for the Legionaries, since the misdeeds of founder Father […]