General Articles
The anti-natalist movement, which calls for humans to stop having children, involves many secular people and can be seen as a reaction to recent technologies of birth that have given humans greater control over matters of life and death, writes Jack Jiang in Anthropology Today (November/
Paganism in Lithuania and in much of Europe is receiving more recognition from governments, but still has some way to go toward receiving equal treatment with other religions, writes Chas Clifton in his Pagan studies blog Letter from Hardscrabble Creek (December 14).
The large Pentecostal movement among Spain’s Roma or Gitano population has created a marriage market where Christian Gitano men are considered a “good catch,” writes Antonio Montañés Jiménez in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (online in December).
While some have seen the Russian Orthodox Church’s new outreach to Africa and other regions of the global South as a partnership with the Russian state to extend its influence in these countries, that partnership is far from an equal one for the church, writes Mikhail Suslov in the journal Re
There is a fear of Judaism in Israeli culture, rooted in the concern that the Jewish religion will threaten and potentially eliminate secular Israeli identity, writes Gideon Katz (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Sede-Boker, Israel) in Israel Affairs (30:4).
After the rapid fall of the Assad regime, the jihadist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has quickly become the key player in Syria and is evolving towards an ideological refocusing that is “at once Sunni, Islamic, conservative and revolutionary,” according to Swiss researcher Patrick Haenn
In the case of Christian converts to Islam in the Philippines, religious conversion does not always involve a complete transformation or separation from previous religious and social ties, a recent study finds.
“Daoists, as much as devotees of all other religions in China, are severely affected by the Sinicization policies,” writes Karine Martin in the newsletter Bitter Winter (December 19–20).
Despite professionalization, Muslim clergy in the U.S. rely on an informal “Rolodex” of contacts composed of fellow imams, students, and other sources of support to fill leadership positions in American Islam, Nancy Khalil and Safiyah Zaidi write in the journal American Religion (Fall).
Divisions over same-sex marriage and LGBTQ ordination in the Anglican Communion are now expanding to include new issues related to the nature of the priesthood, including women’s ordination, and deeper matters of biblical interpretation among conservative Anglicans.