Iran is not likely to follow other Muslim nations in undergoing revolutions that allow Islam to retain a role in national affairs. It is more likely that any movement to revolt against the Iranian regime will be more secular than religious, writes sociologist Ahmad Sadri. In the e-newsletter Sightings (March 3), Sadri writes that because […]

Inside Israel (March), an evangelical newsletter on Israeli affairs, reports that there is increasing sympathy among European Jews with the prospect of leaving the continent with the rise of anti-Semitism. The newsletter quotes prominent Dutch politician and former EU commissioner Wits Bolkestein as expressing his concern for the future of Orthodox Jews in the Netherlands, […]

Conservative Judaism has been in sharp decline since 2001 and other liberal Jewish bodies are organizing and strategizing to address their own declining memberships, reports the Jewish newspaper Forward (February 18). A draft of a strategic plan by the denomination reveals that there has been a 14 percent decline in Conservative membership in the last […]

The largest non-ethnic Orthodox church body in the U.S., the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), is facing a growing traditionalist-fundamentalist element as well as an attempt to steer the communion in the direction of Russian Orthodoxy. In his blog Religion and Other Curiosities (March 2 entry), sociologist Peter Berger reports on what he calls “the […]

The Legionaries of Christ, an influential conservative Catholic religious and lay order, may have difficulty rehabilitating itself after its recently deceased founder was revealed to have left a long trail of sexual abuse and corruption behind him. The dilemmas of replacing a charismatic leader is compounded for the Legionaries, since the misdeeds of founder Father […]

The academic study of Islam has grown rapidly in American universities, particularly since the events surrounding Sept. 11, but scholarly study has turned more toward defense of the field and sometimes Islam itself rather than engaging in new lines of research, writes Richard C. Martin in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (December). […]

“There is a need to secularize society [in Egypt]!” said Bishop Yohanna Qolta, Deputy Patriarch of the Catholic Copts, to a group of surprised Swiss and Egyptian journalists recently. The bishop made the unexpected statement to journalists who had been invited by the Religioscope Institute to attend a week-long seminar on Media & Religion in […]

With a bomb explosion killing nine people on January 25, this month’s toll of insurgency-related deaths in Muslim-majority southern Thailand rose to 22. Around 30,000 soldiers and thousands of paramilitary troops guard the three provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat that border Malaysia. At least 4,000 people have been killed and over 7,000 injured in […]