The Jewish day school movement associated with Conservative Judaism has shown a steep decline, paralleling the membership losses suffered by the Conservative movement as a whole, reports Forward.com (January 27). The website reports that the schools, known as the Schechter Day School Network, were long considered the “crown jewel of the Conservative movement.” But since […]

Reforms enacted in the training and formation of American Catholic priests, some of which took place 20 years ago, may be responsible for the sharp decline in child abuse cases in the last decade, according to an article in the Jesuit America magazine (January 2–9). The most reliable studies that have been conducted, such as […]

Graphic novels are the latest form of popular culture and media where mysticism and the paranormal are given free reign, writes Jeffrey J. Kripal in the Chronicle of Higher Education Review (December 16). Kripal, who authored the recent book Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics and the Paranormal (University of Chicago Press), writes that […]

From the mid-1950s, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) went through a phase of re-emphasizing its distinctiveness in relation to wider American culture, but during the Hinckley era, starting in 1995, the pendulum of church culture has swung somewhat toward assimilation, writes Armand L. Mauss in an essay published in Dialogue: A […]

The growth of orthodox—and in some cases militant—forms of Islam is leading to a belated attempt to manage the new religious pluralism in Kazakhstan. A special section on religion in Kazakhstan in the the journal Central Asia and the Caucasus (Volume 12, Number 3) reports that the delicate balancing act maintained by the Kazakh leaders […]

Muslim–Coptic Christian tensions are at their height in Egypt after security forces killed 27 Copt civilians demonstrating peacefully. The October massacre at Maspero—a Cairo neighborhood—is the latest of several cases of violence and repression against Egypt’s Christian minority. The democratic revolution in Tahir Square was marked by a religious consensus, but since last spring, this […]

A posture of openess on the part of the current Turkish government toward the Alevis is taking place at the same time that this quasi-Muslim group is experiencing internal divisions regarding their identity in relation to Islam, write Bayram Ali Soner (Izmir University) and Şule Toktaş (Kadir Has University, Istanbul) in the September issue of […]

Despite the Netherlands’ reputation as a bastion of secularism, a “Bible Belt” of conservative Protestantism has maintained itself in the small nation, which includes a political wing feeling new pressure from the secular right, writes Phillip Jenkins in the Christian Century (October 4). The Dutch Bible Belt runs from the northeast to the southwest of […]