Conservative and Reform Jews in the U.S. have expressed concerns about a conversion bill recently discussed in the Israeli Knesset that could erode the legitimacy of conversions performed by them. Fearing that the bill could create a rift in the Jewish world and affect political support for Israel among North American Jews, Prime Minister Benjamin […]

In several parts of the Muslim world authorities have been tempted to promote Sufism, the mystical Islamic movement, as a way of counteracting Islamist ideologies. This strategy is also in play in Dagestan, in the Russian part of the Caucasus, although not everyone—including Sufis themselves—is enthusiastic about giving a religious monopoly over to one strand […]

On July 13, the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission warned that two Christian men from Pakistan’s Punjab province, Rashid and Sajid Emmanuel, were in danger after their arrest on frivolous charges of blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad. Five days later, suspected Islamist extremists shot them dead outside a courthouse, reports the U.S.-based Compass Direct News […]

Afghanistan is an Islamic country, predominantly Sunni (with a 15 percent minority of Shi’a), of 30 million people, but against all odds, some 2,000 Hindus and Sikhs have survived in the country, reports German scholar Manfred Hutter (Bonn University) in an article in Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft (dated 2009/2, but actually published this summer). These two […]

Malta, known as a stronghold of Roman Catholicism in secular Europe, is undergoing secular challenges, mainly resulting from its membership of the European Union and because of the tarnished public image of the church due to clergy sex abuse scandals. The Catholic World Report (June) notes that Malta is still a strongly Catholic country both […]

After a period of engagement, Eastern Orthodox and evangelical Christians have hardened their attitudes toward each other, resulting in a curtailment of dialogue between the two groups. The evangelical missions journal Transformation (July) notes that the dialogue and cooperation that emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s between Eastern Orthodox and evangelicals was mainly over […]

The Catholic charismatic movement in Haiti, one of the fastest growing and largest in the world, is helping the church rebound from losses to Protestant groups and is poised to be a major social force in the country, writes Terry Rey in an article in Pneuma, a biannual journal on Pentecostalism (issue 32, 2010). In […]

The dissent and divisions that have resulted in American Lutheranism following the 2009 decision to support the ordination of gays and lesbians in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) has followed a distinctly “post-denominational,” decentralized pattern. Network News (May/ June), the newsletter of the conservative Lutheran renewal group Word Alone, notes that even before […]

01: The rift between mainline Presbyterians and the American Jewish community over the former’s critical position on Israel’s policy on the Palestinian issue was mended to some degree during the denomination’s General Assembly in early July. Since 2004, the position of the Presbyterian Church (USA) on Israel, calling for divestment from multinational companies operating in […]