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The Southern Baptist Convention's annual gathering in New Orleans just expelled or "disfellowshipped" member churches that allowed women to hold pastoral positions. Among the expelled was the amazingly successful Saddleback Church of Southern California, founded by superstar-Pastor Rick Warren, a church that had grown from a six-person Bible study group in 1980 to 15 campuses […]

Rory Cellan-Jones talks to Iza Hussin and Paul Seabright about recent trends in world religions, the interplay between politics and religion, and the economics of religion.
The post What is the future of religion? appeared first on Bennett Institute for Public Policy.

As OECD countries move forward with marriage equality, Japan's stance remains unchanged, with the ruling party's religious alliances suggesting a reason for the status quo. But the majority of Japanese favour legalisation.

  Over the past two months, I see that religion is playing a significant role in politics, both domestically and internationally. The UK and Ireland archbishops' warning of the government’s Internal Market Bill, ongoing confrontation between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the French President Emmanuel Macron over Islam and Secularism, and the Catholic Church's […]
The post Intersection of Religion and Politics– who is on the losing side in this encounter. appeared first on Gulay Icoz.

Can religion and politics ever be separated? What about in the context of the US presidential campaigns? With one year to go until the 2024 elections, Kristian Noll takes a look at the presence and position of faith. Faith's Historic Role in the American Polity American politics and religion cannot be divorced. The founding of … Continued

It feels like every year we have more reasons than ever to bring religion into the social sciences. I've now been editing LSE RGS for the whole of this Gregorian, Julian, and lunar year, and I've enjoyed every second. At the end of each year we look back on the different trends and discourses that … Continued

A pattern over time

For our Covenantal Pluralism series, Alberto Cavallarin applies Paul Feyerabend’s philosophical reasoning to the debates around freedom of religion. On a rainy Saturday, a year or so ago, I found myself in an antique bookstore in the beautiful Dutch city of Utrecht. There, hidden amongst dusty encyclopaedias and old French books, I stumbled upon a … Continued

Justin Burnworth (University of Massachusetts Amherst) has posted The Ministerial Exception Paradox (Quinnipiac Law Review [FORTHCOMING]) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: The "ministerial exception" spent the last few decades knocking at the Supreme Court's door with no answer. The...

Daniel Cox, Director and Founder of the Survey Center on American Life, interviewed me about the status of religion in the U.S. (though he is probably more expert than I!) for his excellent substack series, American Storylines, here. Dan gave me a chance to reflect on religious trends, how we study those trends, and how […]

I have had a laminated image pinned, stuck, or otherwise attached to various office walls for many years, since 2003 indeed, as I've moved between roles and institutions this has been one constant. The image is from the cover of Mute Magazine, Issue 26. It is a line drawing depicting a desk, on it a Macintosh PowerBook G4, Apple's then state of the art portable computer – around it are drawn scenes from the global anti-capitalist struggles of the period. There is a picture of Sub-Commandant Marcos of the Mexican Zapatistas, in iconic balaclava, smoking a pipe and looking away into the mid-distance. There is another picture of workers in a field of GM crops, and one of a high-tech ...

Marc Andreessen's recent "tech optimist manifesto" is one of the most significant statements of Silicon Valley ideology. As I've written elsewhere, it's actually less a political manifesto than an apostolic credo for the Religion of Progress. The words "we believe" appear no less than 113 times in the text, not counting synonyms. The core precept […]

For decades, social scientific study of religion has been dominated by the secularisation question: is religion growing or declining? But this has distracted us from asking how religion itself is changing and, in turn, changing understandings of identity, political participation and citizenship for millions of people around the world. Ahead of our upcoming #LSEFestival panel … Continued

How do students experience religious difference, and what can universities do to build positive encounters between people of different religions and worldviews? In this article, researchers at Coventry University’s Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations share some insights from their recent report. This week, we published the report Building Student Relationships across Religion and … Continued

In general, I think the left focuses too much on national politics, when a lot of the action is happening at the state level. So I want to discuss politics in Michigan, my home state since 1987. Ann Arbor is even more blue than Detroit, but overall Michigan is basically a 50-50 state. Trump won […]