01: Providence is a new quarterly magazine seeking to rehabilitate and reinvigorate evangelical engagement involvement in foreign policy. Published by the Institute for Religion and Democracy, the magazine has a distinct neoconservative orientation, arguing that evangelicals and other Christians have fallen into either isolationism or pacifism. The lead article illustrates the very different evangelical situation […]

01: There has been a steady stream of recent books on atheism and secularism in less than a year.  They range from studies of the broader phenomenon of secularism to more specific examinations of atheist groups, movements and practices (including RW’s editor and co-author Christopher Smith’s Atheist Awakening). American Secularism (NYU Press, $27), by Joseph […]

01: A movement of scientists and environmental thinkers and activists embracing evolution as a kind of secular religion comes under scrutiny and critique in the current issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture (9.2). Such thinkers and scientists as Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson have charged that the traditional religious […]

01: The social science magazine Society devotes much of its October/November issue to the topic of “the religious and the secular in medicine and health.” The articles cover a wide range of relevant subjects, including the use of spirituality in hospital treatment and bioethics. Candy Gunther Brown looks at the growth of integrative medicine, which […]

01: The Journal of Religious and Political Practice is a new annual publication that examines the interplay of religion and politics in an interdisciplinary and global perspective. In the inaugural issue, the editors state that the journal will “explore ideas about religion and politics, not just as ideologies or belief systems, but as rituals, practices, […]

01: The current issue of the online journal Science, Religion & Culture (June) is devoted to atheism as both a philosophy and worldview and in its various organizational expressions. The introduction goes over the familiar territory of defining atheism, non-religion and religion, looking specifically how secularism and faith is related to human betterment. An article […]

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) […]

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 […]

01: There are a growing number of Muslim chaplains in the military in Western nations and, like their counterparts in the prison chaplaincy [see March RW], they tend to operate along the lines established by Christian churches in such ministries, writes Kristina Stoeckl and Olivier Roy in the current issue of the journal Religion, State, […]

01: The April issue of the quarterly journal The Muslim World is devoted to the little known branch of Ibadi Islam, which is the majority faith in Oman but also present in Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Zanzibar and along the East Africa coast. The Ibadi developed from conflicts over successors of Mohammad and tended to stress […]