General Articles
The Catholic Church in the Philippines is losing its once substantial civic role as it faces growing secularism and an aggressively anti-Catholic president, writes Adam Willis in Commonweal magazine (February 22).
While the New Atheist movement, represented by such authors and spokesmen as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, has lost much of its public prominence, its contentious form of atheism is now more often directed at academic liberalism as well as Islam.
There are signals of a new dynamism of the religious left in the U.S. for similar—if opposite—reasons to those that drove the Moral Majority on the right 40 years ago, writes Tom Gjelten in NPR News (Jan. 24).
Changes to one of the special ceremonies held at the temples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) that extensively revised and eliminated references to traditional gender roles have been favorably received by church members and may result in more egalitarian attitudes toward g
Interfaith dialogue at the international level is well-meaning, but it is unclear if it advances its stated goals of reducing tensions and conflicts, writes Jeffrey Haynes (London Metropolitan University) in an issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs (Fall 2018)
A U.S.-style “culture war” seems unlikely in strongly secularized Dutch society, yet, with the help of American evangelical influence in the Netherlands’ small Bible Belt, this seems to be occurring, reports The Economist (January 9).
While the schools and educational movement inspired by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) first spread in German-speaking countries and then in other areas of the Western world, they are now present in other cultural surroundings as well.
Russia has actively been promoting a politically pacifist form of Islam, which is coinciding with a push by certain Arab countries to encourage Islamic moderation, writes Hassan Hassan in The Atlantic (January 5).
In what is reported to be the worst crackdown on religion since the country’s Cultural Revolution when Mao Zedong’s government vowed to eradicate religion, researchers say that the current drive in China is less about destroying Christianity than “bringing it to heel,” reports The Guardian
Fundamentalist Baptists are facing their own sex abuse crisis, propelled by their churches’ pastor-centered model of leadership, according to an in-depth report in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (December 9).