Religion Watch Archives

Monitoring Trends in Religion - From February 1990 to January 2016

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Alternative versions of Scientology flourish in the `Free Zone’

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Although the Church of Scientology has tried to sue schismatic groups out of existence, a steady stream of defectors have resulted in a large but loosely-organized and Internet-driven community of people who still consider themselves Scientologists known as the “Free Zone,” writes James Lewis in the current issue  of the Finnish journal Temenos (Vol. 49, […]

How sustainable is the Evangelicals’ urban turn?

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There is a “big change on the horizon that is taking place in cities” as evangelicals increasingly focus their attention on urban ministry, according to Common Place, (March 26-27), an urban affairs blog published by the University of Virginia’s Institute for the Advanced Studies in Culture. Both figuratively and literally, American evangelicals “are coming back […]

Findings & Footnotes: Findings & Footnotes: April 2014

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01: Several articles in the current issue of the Mennonite Quarterly Review (January) are devoted to the complex and shifting interplay of technology and tradition in the Amish and other strict Anabaptist groups. Contrary to popular perceptions, the use of technology is not totally and uniformly forbidden to any of these groups; rather, it is a […]

Growth of social media creates religious conflict and dialogue in Africa

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The growing access to social media in Africa can as easily promote religious conflict and violence as interfaith understanding and public education about religious difference, says religion scholar Rosalind Hackett in an interview in the journal Social Compass (March). Hackett says that the impact of media deregulation in much of Africa is just beginning to […]

Religious minorities’ role in Ukraine conflict raises new tensions with Russia and Orthodoxy

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The involvement of Protestant Christians as well as Greek Catholics in the recent political developments in Ukraine causes concern to Russians as well as to the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. Not only is the new acting Ukrainian president, Aleksandr Turchinov, a Baptist, but there are a number of people belonging to other […]

Muslim converts to Christianity chart their own evangelical path

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While counting and identifying Muslim converts to Christianity is difficult because such conversions are usually penalized in many Islamic societies, recent research suggests this group of Christians might be distinct both from the traditional churches of their own lands and from Western missionaries and their method of “contextualization,” or making Christianity relevant to a particular […]

Saudi Arabia reassessing jihadist challenge

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While Saudi Arabia has used Salafism and jihadism to promote its foreign policy interests, it faces more and more of such groups challenging the Kingdom’s official clerics’ status as a source of authority for Salafism. This has led Saudi Arabia to declare recently two jihadist groups in Syria as terrorist organizations, writes Kamran Bokhari  on […]