01: Despite divisions on the official level, there is widespread support for gay and lesbian rabbis among educators, leaders and seminarians in Conservative Judaism, according to a survey commissioned by the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). The survey, conducted via the Internet, found that among 5,583 rabbis, cantors and JTS students, two-thirds of the respondents support openly […]

01: Bishops are a determining factor in the vitality of Catholic dioceses, according to a diocese-by-diocese study of American Catholicism. The study, presented in Crisis magazine (February/March), rates the vitality of dioceses according to the criteria of increases in the number of active priests, ordinations, and adults received into the church. There is a clear geographical pattern among […]

01: The new U.S. Congress is one of the most religiously pluralistic in American history, with a Muslim joining the ranks for the first time. The e-newsletter Sightings (January 4) reports that along with African-American Muslim Keith Ellison (who raised controversy by requesting to take his oath of office by swearing on the Koran rather than the Bible), […]

01: There is a significant “charity gap” between religious believers and secular liberals and even secular conservatives, both in making donations and in donating their time, according to a new study. The study, published in the book Who Really Cares (Basic) by Arthur C. Brooks of Syracuse University, finds that the reason conservatives tend to be more charitable […]

01: The Episcopal Church has experience a “precipitous” loss of nearly 115,000 members over the past three years, mainly over the issue of homosexuality. The Christian Century (November 14) reports that the losses come after a period of relative stability, if not much growth, in the denomination. Half of the losses are said to stem from parish conflicts […]

01: Charismatics, even more than their Pentecostal counterparts, comprise a growing percentage of the world’s Christians, according to a new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The study is the largest of its kind, including surveys of 10 countries with sizeable Pentecostal and charismatic populations. The study distinguishes charismatics from Pentecostals in […]

01: A new major survey finds that 10.8 percent of Americans have no religious ties, challenging other studies that have placed the figure around 14 percent as a sign that secularization is growing. The researchers who conducted the new Baylor University survey argue that other studies didn’t ask the right questions Baylor asked respondents to choose […]

01: Mormons, and evangelicals are the most likely groups to have large families, but such factors as the education of the mothers and the effect of “congregational cultures” also significantly affect the fertility rate, according to a paper presented at the meeting of the Association of the Sociology of Religion. In his paper, Conrad Hackett of […]

01: Although the population of U.S. Catholics rose by more than a million last year, the church showed a loss of school enrollment and sacramental observance, according to the 2006 Official Catholic Directory. The directory, which gathers statistics from diocesan reports, found that Catholic school enrollment declined by 13,000 to just under 680,000 students. The decline […]

01: Fifty percent of Americans report that they have had religious experience, according to the first nationally representative study of spiritual transformations. The study was conducted by Tom Smith of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, who added a special National Spiritual Transformation Study module to the […]