In India, 35 of the top 50 domestic tourist destinations are religious sites. At the ISSR conference, Kiran A. Shinde (University of New England, Australia) presented a paper on economic opportunities in religious tourism showing how different types of religious devotions and different organizational structures result in various levels of impact upon local communities. According […]

An “experimental Buddhism” marks a growing number of temples in Japan, as priests seek to adapt their organizations to changes in society, while often bypassing their denominations in the process, according to an article in the Journal of Global Buddhism (Vol. 12, 2011). John Nelson writes that it is widely recognized that the traditional Buddhist temple […]

A fledgling pro-life movement in Russia is borrowing strategies from its American counterpart, as well as creating strange bedfellows between Russian Orthodox and evangelical believers, reports Sophia Kishkovsky in the New York Times (June 9). The article reports that Russian activists have adopted the English term “pro-life” as their own and American-style pickets of abortion […]

In accounting for current state of new religious movements (NRMs) in Britain, George Chryssides notes that the growing globalization of these groups tends to make national developments or even leadership less important. In a paper presented at the CESNUR conference in Taipei, Taiwan, Chryssides says that growing internationalization of NRMs in Britain could be seen […]

Catholic conservatives in the U.S. are engaged in an attempt to spread their views among potentially sympathetic circles across Europe, assessing that the situation there is more critical than in America, said Blandine Chélini-Pont (University Aix-Marseille III) at the ISSR conference in Aix-en-Provence. Chélini-Pont describes conservative Catholicism as the ideological source of today’s American conservatism. […]

While a number of observers claim that Scientology’s membership has stagnated in several European countries, a different view comes from the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. According to the 2010 security report of the Ministry of Interior of the state, Scientology has registered a strong increase in the area, both in members and in […]

A controversy about the place for atheists in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has been spreading throughout the recovery organization, according to The Fix (June 14), a newsletter reporting on America’s drug and rehab culture. The controversy started when two AA meetings that cater to atheists and agnostics were expelled from Toronto’s official directory. The meetings in […]