01: Habitat for Humanity is among the most well-known and respected of Christian charitable organizations in the U.S. But in his new book, Habitat for Humanity: Building Private Homes, Building Public Religion (Temple University Press, $24.95), Jerome Baggett investigates how the organization reflects and often encourages the tendency toward individualized religion divorced from denominational and congregational attachments. […]

01: New York City has often been viewed as an exception to religious America, much in the same way that Europe becomes peculiarly secular compared to the rest of the world. That assessment of  the U.S.’ largest city should be rethought with the recent publication of New York Glory: Religions in the City (NYU Press, $19.50) edited by […]

01: Three recent issues of Center Conversations (No. 5, 7 and 8), a newsletter of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, serve as good introductions to recent trends in Catholic, evangelical, and Jewish communities. Each issue features a main address on developments in each tradition followed by a roundtable discussion by journalists and scholars. Originally a series […]

01: The Fall issue of Turning Wheel, the magazine of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, is devoted to Buddhists of Asian descent in the U.S. The meditative kinds of Buddhism taken up by mainly white converts has received the most media attention, while immigrant and other ethnic Buddhists have fallen through the cracks. The issue features articles on […]

01: European scholars have long held that the U.S. is the exception to the secularization occurring in the Western world. Grace Davie’s new book Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (Oxford, $27.95) demonstrates that it is actually Europe that is now exceptional. Davie, a British sociologist, presents evidence of continuing disaffection from the established (particularly, the […]

01: The July-August issue of Prism carries a special forum on the state of evangelical feminism. The overall mood is somber, as the respondents note that while evangelical feminists seemed on the verge of “winning the day” in the early 1980s, today this is a strong movement to reassert anti-feminist views in the evangelical community, particularly on […]

01: Seeker Churches: Promoting Traditional Religion in a Nontraditional Way (Rutgers University Press, $20) by Kimon Howland Sargeant, is one of the first sociological treatments of the megachurch-seeker service phenomenon. Sargeant focuses on the congregations and work of the Willow Creek Association (WCA), the seeker church organization started by the pioneer megachurch Willow Creek Community Church near […]

01: The sweep and influence of the third Parliament of the World’s Religions, held in Cape Town, South Africa in 1999, are featured in the current issue of  World Faiths Encounter (March). Included are editorial overviews, reports on the widespread cultural diversity of the participants, a look at the “next generation” of youth leaders’ contributions, the leadership […]

01: Timothy Miller’s The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse University Press, $24.95) goes beyond a standard history of the intentional communities. Miller, professor of religion at the University of Kansas, provides both the historical backgrounds and the current status of these communes, many of which were religious in origin. In fact, the much publicized hippies’ communes […]

01: Although a relatively recent movement (despite its allegiance to ancient traditions and deities), Neopagans often show a good deal of concern and speculation about their future. The winter issue of the magazine PanGaia carries several articles attempting to chart “paganism in the 21st century.” Some of the forecasts have been made before — how liberal Christian […]