News

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.

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.

China’s state authorities are exerting greater pressure on the country’s underground Catholics to join government-approved organizations, according to reports.

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). 

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.

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).

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).

Sources 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).

While talk of a national revival is seen as an exaggeration, church leaders and other observers are now claiming that “regional revivals” in American Catholicism are taking shape. 

Idaho Reformed preacher Doug Wilson drew fire in March for calling Catholic Marian and Eucharistic processions “idolatrous” and saying that in a Protestant America they should be outlawed.

The documented growth of Eastern Orthodoxy in America, with a large wave of young adults, especially men, joining the faith, is leading to a related wave of homeschooling Orthodox families.

In its series of reports on denominational statistics, the Substack newsletter Graphs about Religion (March 12) notes that the United Church of Christ (UCC) stands out for its lack of positive indicators.

The Temple Mount in Jerusalem has shifted from a site of Jewish radicalism to a more politically moderate pilgrimage site with a greater role in religious Zionism.

Two American Catholic sisters who experienced spiritual abuse firsthand have founded a new religious order dedicated to accompanying Catholics who have been hurt, scandalized, or driven away by the church's long-running abuse crisis, reports Maggie Phillips in The Dispatch (March 11). 

Resistance to the Trump administration, especially over its policy and actions on immigration, has injected new vitality into the religious left, although the staying power of such activism remains to be seen, according to reports. 

America is “in the middle of a second Mormon moment,” this time led by a cadre of women influencers and reality TV stars, some of whom are ex-members of the Latter-day Saints.

While the secular “literary ecosystem” is in decline, a Christian book culture seems to be thriving. Publications with a distinct Christian identity that feature book reviews and review essays are numerous and increasing.

The controversy over the associations of well-known leaders and figures with Jeffrey Epstein has reached the New Age and wellness movements, resulting in cancellation but also recognition of the need to find new ways to hold leaders accountable for their behavior. 

The surge of converts to Eastern Orthodoxy in the U.S. is meeting a decades-old shortage of Orthodox priests. Since the 1990s, there have been reports and planning commissions to address the Orthodox clergy shortage in most jurisdictions.

Christian higher education (CHE) is still growing, unlike its broader state and secular counterparts, according to new enrollment data from the 2024 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.

Secularism appears to be losing ground in Sweden, though like other countries, it is too soon to say that religion is overshadowing non-belief, writes Joel Halldorf in the online newsletter of the Christian journal Comment (January 8). 

In Central Asia, some Sufi groups are attempting to balance “the preservation of tradition with the demands of digital culture.

In addition to the impact of members switching affiliations, Pentecostalism has been reshaping traditional Protestant churches in Nigeria through their adoption of Pentecostal practices.

Scholars, practitioners, and laypeople continue to argue about whether a religious revival is afoot, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Project Blitz, an initiative created by the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, Wallbuilders, and the National Legal Foundation, is one of the more influential efforts of the ambiguous Christian nationalist movement.