The Serbian Orthodox Church is attempting to shed its past image as a stronghold of nationalism and foster interfaith and ecumenical dialogue. At a mid-June New York conference RW attended, Boris Milosavljevic, Yugoslavian Deputy Secretary of Religious Affairs, and Metropolitan Amfilohije of Montanegro and the Littoral spoke of plans to hold an interfaith conference next year that would […]

Some 300 Mexican Indians have converted to Islam in Chiapas in the southern part of the country since 1995. Fifteen of them have already made the pilgrimage to Mecca last November, reports Inter Press Service (June 18). Those conversions are the result of missionary efforts launched by Spanish members of the Murabitun (http://www.murabitun.org), a sometimes controversial group […]

The strong Internet presence of the Lutheran Church in Estonia as well as in Finland, two countries on the shores of the Baltic Sea, came as a surprise to RW during the ECIC’s conference. In Estonia, 20 percent of the population connects to the Internet at least once a week. The country is far ahead of the […]

Around the mid-1990s, members of Protestant and Catholic Churches in several European countries began to pay attention to the Internet. Since then, the growth of interest and involvement has been rapid. For instance, there are today no less than 6,200 Catholic websites in Italy, Fr. Franco Mazza, web coordinator of the Conference of Italian bishops, […]

There doesn’t seem to be any sign that ecumenism will recover from its doldrums, particularly as interfaith relations and a concern for coexistence now outweigh the drive for church unity among most denominations. In an article in Ecumenical Trends magazine (June), Lutheran ecumenist William  G. Rusch offers the above prognosis on ecumenism, noting that a long term decline […]

The late June Supreme Court decision in favor of vouchers for private schools is likely to have favorable repercussions for faith-based groups seeking government support. A late June decision by the Supreme Court upheld that public money can support religious education as long as parents are given the choice of where to send their children […]

It is difficult to predict violence in new religious movements based on objective measures, if only because such tendencies and actions are linked to a group’s perceptions of assault from the outside world, according to David Bromley of Commonwealth University. That was one of the conclusions drawn by several scholars gathered for a session on […]

The sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church is likely to have a major impact on younger generations, such as Generation X, according to observers. At a recent conference on anti-Catholicism in New York [see last month’s RW for full coverage], historian John McGreevy remarked that just as Vatican II was the defining event in the church […]

The fall of the Taliban has done little to end religious discrimination against minorities  in Afghanistan. The Boston Globe (May 6) reports that official government persecution, such as the wearing of colored badges to identify minorities as either Hindu or Sikh (the two largest minorities in Afghanistan), ended when the Taliban was defeated four months ago. But Muslims […]

A recent conference of French Muslims reveals that this group is increasingly pressing for mainstream acceptance while experiencing divisions within their own ranks. In early May about 75,000 people — the highest number ever — visited the annual gathering of Muslims in France near Paris. There are today some 17 million Muslims in Western Europe, […]