Belief in Christ’s resurrection remains strong among the Church of England’s bishops, according to an unscientific poll conducted by The Spectator, (April 14), a British weekly. The magazine polled every diocese in the Church of England the week before Easter, asking the local bishop, or bishops’ office, if he or she believed in the physical resurrection […]

The phenomenon of priests taking up popular styles of music and ministry to fight the influence of evangelicals is becoming more common in Chile, as in the rest of  Latin America. Catholics adapting the style of evangelicals and Pentecostals as a strategy to counter evangelical growth in Latin America may have started in Brazil, as priests […]

Evangelicals in Canada are increasingly coming into conflict with laws and charging that they face  discrimination for their views, reports Christianity Today (April 2). The growth of anti-evangelical attitudes and a growing cultural and religious divide was revealed in the wake of the defeat of Stockwell Day for Prime Minister. Day’s candidacy “became a lightening rod for criticism […]

Easter is being increasingly commercialized, with merchandisers hoping to make the holiday second only to Christmas for gift- and toy-buying, according to the New York Times (April 13). While the “commercialization of Easter has a long way to go before it comes close to matching the Christmas frenzy,  toymakers are finding the spring holiday as a desirable time […]

The Mikvah bath, once the sole preserve of Orthodox Jews, is being adopted and changed by Conservative and Reform synagogues, reports Moment magazine (April). The bath’s primary function is to ritually purify converts to Judaism, and is also used by Orthodox Jewish women at the end of menstruation as taught by Jewish family purity laws. Reform and […]

Prayer chains that were once confined to a congregation or a close circle of friends are now being circulated throughout the world over the Internet, causing new concerns about privacy in the process. The Dallas Morning News (April 30) reports that prayer requests that are posted on religious web sites are easily circulated to other web sites […]

Who has been the most influential evangelical in the U.S during the last 25 years? The answer to that question tends to bring up the usual candidates: Billy Graham, Bill Bright of Campus Crusade, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, or perhaps Pat Robertson. The Evangelical Studies Bulletin, (Winter) the newsletter of the Institute for […]

The feminist Re-Imagining movement is experiencing tensions over whether to confine its work within Christian boundaries as well as how to reach out beyond its middle-class, white constituency, reports Faith & Freedom (Winter), the newsletter of the conservative Institute on Religion and Democracy. The Re-Imagining movement gained headlines and notoriety in mainline denominations eight years ago for […]

Is the loss of faith inevitable for religious colleges and universities? In the past few years there have been several studies and books detailing how many of the leading U.S. colleges — from the Ivy League to Catholic schools — have lost their religious identities, making such a transition seem almost like a natural process. […]

The recent destruction of pre-Islamic Buddha images by Afghanistan’s Taliban regime suggests that this Muslim movement is reasserting its militancy after a period of tolerance and even cooperation with other nations on issues ranging from historic preservation to women’s rights, reports the Washington Post (March 20). The widely reported destruction of invaluable Buddhist statues by the Taliban […]