Religion Watch Archives

Monitoring Trends in Religion - From February 1990 to January 2016

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Hindus, Sikhs feeling discrimination, consider exiting Afghanistan

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Many Hindus and Sikhs have left or are considering leaving Afghanistan due to increasing discrimination by the country’s religious majority, reports Hinduism Today (April/May/June). Hindu and Muslim residents estimate that the population has declined to about 7,000 from the approximately 200,000 Sikhs and Hindus in Afghanistan before 1992. One issue in contention is the Hindu […]

A global Catholic moment for Africa—or is it Latin America?

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While African Catholics have been viewed as the future of the church by their sheer numbers, there are also signs that the African church is in a position to become a moral voice on its continent as well as in global Catholicism, writes John L. Allen on the Catholic website Crux (March 24). Allen notes […]

Gun control moves on to mainline, ecumenical agendas

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Mainline Protestants and other ecumenical religious groups are using a range of strategies to fight for gun control, writes David A. Graham in The Atlantic (February). “A coalition of mainline Protestant denominations, the Catholic Church, and Jewish and Muslim leaders are now among the staunchest institutional backers of stricter gun control,” he adds. Some of […]

Not all Pentecostals are growing in Latin America

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Although Pentecostalism shows few signs of decline in Latin America, one prominent denomination is seeing serious losses, and it may be because they are behind the curve in using technology and media. For the first time since its inception, the Congregação Cristã in Brasil (CCB) has lost members— 200,000 members in the last decade—while other […]

Jewish rebirth in Ukraine

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Since 1991, a number of Jewish communities and organizations have reappeared in Ukraine, writes Juliana Smilianskaya, director of the Institute for Jewish Studies in Kyiv, in Religion & Gesellschaft in Ost und West (February). Their number has regularly grown since Ukrainian independence and has enjoyed the support of international Jewish organizations. Currently, 290 Jewish communities […]

Turkey’s new ‘mosque diplomacy?’

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A state sponsored program to build mosques in foreign countries has emerged as a foreign policy instrument for Turkey and a way to assert a leadership role in the Muslim world, writes Thomas Seibert in Al Monitor (Feb. 13). The Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) runs the international mosque-building program through a foundation. Most recently, […]

Featured Story: Alcoholics Anonymous caught between ‘secularizers’ and ‘fundamentalists’

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Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is showing growing conflict and diversity over the role and meaning of spirituality in its meetings, although the organization is likely to hold together, write psychologists Ernest Kurtz and William White in the current issue of the online journal Religions (No. 6, 2015). In the last few years there have been feuds […]

Online ordinations put to unconventional spiritual uses

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Online ordinations groups, such as the Universal Life Church (ULC), are branching out from mainly offering the public “priests for the day” for friends and family members’ weddings to appealing to more serious spiritual entrepreneurs seeking a license for their unconventional ministries, writes Heather Adams in the Washington Post (Jan. 13).  The ULC and related […]

Adventists’ evangelical temptation

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There is a growing clash in Seventh Day Adventism between those who want to move closer to evangelicals in worship style and shared beliefs and those pressing for maintaining Adventist identity, reports Christianity Today (January/February). For more than a decade, there has been a movement of Adventists toward contemporary evangelical worship styles and closer cooperation […]