Looking beyond the walls of churches, synagogues, and denominational officialdom to examine how religion really affects, and is affected by, the wider society. Published every month, its digital content is unique because it focuses on long-range developments that lead to, and result from, global current events.
Current Issue
Past IssuesSources of data and research methodologies concerning anti-Christian violence in Nigeria have become a bone of contention between religious freedom advocates and secular academia, the media, and humanitarian workers in the West, writes Dennis Petri in his Substack newsletter Five4Faith (April 17).
Sephardic Judaism, with its emphasis on maintaining tradition and peoplehood over mainstream acceptance and freedom, is poised to overtake Ashkenazic Jews in shaping the Jewish presence in the U.S., particularly after October 7 and the rise of anti-Semitism, writes Mijal Bitton in the current issue of the journal Sapir (Winter).
Mining in sacred lands in the U.S. and Australia is drawing new conflicts and creating unusual alliances between conservative religious-liberty groups, radical environmentalists, and some Native American tribes, writes sociologist Barry Kosmin in Free Inquiry magazine (February/March).
Five years after the disruptions of Covid-19, most attenders remain consistently engaged or have increased their congregational attendance, with a significant 38 percent of attenders joining their current church after the pandemic began, according to a new study.
Recent “hate speech bills” and prosecutions of religious and political figures accused of discrimination in Canada and Europe may be evidence of “increasing intolerance in secular Western regimes,” writes religious-freedom activist Paul Marshall in the news service Religion Unplugged (March 31).
China’s state authorities are exerting greater pressure on the country’s underground Catholics to join government-approved organizations, according to reports.
Micro-City: Faith Encounters Super-Diversity in Queens, NY (Fordham University Press, $35), co-authored by RW’s editor Richard Cimino and Hans Tokke, is an in-depth investigation into the effects of ethnic and religious pluralism on congregations.
The College of St. Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, Ohio, is a new kind of Catholic college blending training in the trades with liberal arts into a conservative Catholic framework.