01: Mattias Gardell’s impressive new book Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism (Duke University Press, $23.95) finds that such notorious white supremacist and anti-Semitic groups as the Ku Klux Klan and Christian Identity have been pushed aside as an “old man’s religion.” The most cursory glimpse at white-racist publications, Web pages, and white-power lyrics […]

01: Sociologist Thomas Luckmann’s 1967 book  Invisible Religion was a landmark study of how religious faith was becoming privatized in the modern world, predicting much of the upsurge in alternative and individualistic spirituality. The September issue of the journal Social Compass revisits Luckmann’s study, applying its theories and findings to a  changing Europe. The issue includes an article by Luckmann […]

01: RW’s editor has recently edited  the book, Lutherans Today: American Lutheran Identity in the 21st Century  (Eerdmans Publishing, $20). The paperback examines the sociological and historical dimensions of American Lutheranism and is based on the research of 12 contributors. The first part of the book maps the various movements and changes emerging in American Lutheran churches today: the Lutheran Church-Missouri […]

01: “Not your mother’s broomstick,” is the motto of newWitch (http://www.newwitch.com), a magazine “dedicated to, featuring, and partially written by young or beginning Witches, Wiccans, Neo-Pagans, and other earth-based, ethnic, pre-Christian, shamanic, and magical practitioners.” The quarterly was launched in September 2002; and has a circulation of 10,000 copies. It is a product of BBI Media, which […]

01: A teacher at a high school in Geneva and a lecturer at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), Tariq Ramadan has been enjoying a growing audience among young Muslims in Europe, especially in France. A charismatic speaker, Ramadan (b. 1962) is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Eygpt in the 1920s. […]

01: Prism, the magazine of Evangelicals for Social Action, celebrates its 30th anniversary in its May/June issue. The issue features a series of articles reflecting on the beginnings in the 1970s (stemming from the Chicago Declaration’s  call for evangelical social involvement). and current state of the evangelical left and the general mood is downbeat. Samuel Escobar writes […]

01: The founding of the Brandywine Review of Faith & International Affairs demonstrates the growing interest and involvement of Christians (and notably evangelicals) in diplomacy, human rights and religious freedom. The quarterly, intended both for practitioners and academics, is published by the Institute for Global Engagement, which was founded by Ambassador Robert Seiple, a leader in the […]

01: The conservative evangelical newsweekly World devotes its March 8 cover story to press coverage of the world’s religions. Editor Marvin Olasky examined “several thousand” newspaper articles from January, 2000 to January, 2003 covering the world’s religions and finds two tendencies — “superficiality and syncretism.” In coverage of Islam, the press tends to portray Muslim and Christian […]

John Horgan’s new book Rational Mysticism (Houghton Mifflin, $25) is an intriguing journalistic excursion into  the ever-expanding territory of science and spirituality. Actually, Horgan is mainly concerned with the new science of consciousness studies, which seeks to study mystical and religious experiences. He revisits the well-trod grounds of psychedelic drugs and how they relate to mysticism. Horgan also […]

01: Deprogramming had become an important issue in the cult controversies of the 1970s and probably contributed in part to polarization in the field. Readers may be interested in an in-depth article published in Vol. 1, No. 3 of the Cultic Studies Journal, about how the old model of “forcibly deprogramming persons from controversial ideological organizations […]