November 10, 2022 By Ryan Burge (RNS) — It’s been 30 years since The Washington Post published an article on Christian televangelists, describing their followers as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” The pushback was immediate and overwhelming, as thousands flooded the Post’s telephone switchboard and letters poured in to its editors after Pat

The practice of men avoiding contact with women at work out of concens of impropriety may come at a particularly high price for evangelical working women who are excluded from male-dominated social networks that are critical to professional success, a new study indicates.

The debate about whether the world is entering a more secular age and whether the growth of religiously non-affiliated people is hastening such secularization in part revolves around questions of timing. In other words, when did these trends start and what led to them?

Low pay. Great expectations and scrutiny. And a job where a knack for effective begging comes in handy. So who would want to be an editor of an academic journal on religion? Some who do this work say there needs to be a larger conversation about how journal editors are supported and compensated, and how these issues matter to their mission of disseminating excellent scholarship on religion from throughout the world.

Can you have too much of a good thing when it comes to intellectual humility? The answer is yes, if it means becoming so obsessed with your shortcomings that you opt out of contentious conversations in the classroom, the workplace or the public arena, new studies suggest.

There are few people better able to offer perspective on the polarized state of the nation today than Michael Emerson. In an interview, Emerson, one of the foremost sociologists on race, religion and civility in the United States, offers incisive observations on how we got to where we are today, and what we can do to promote a more intellectually humble, respectful national dialogue.

Amid voices of division, the people of Charlottesville, white and black evangelicals, Jews, Catholics, and people not affiliated with any religious group, lifted up messages balancing love, hope and moral non-equivalence at several sites surrounding the place where one of their own, Heather Heyer, was murdered. One might even call the public response at these memorials a profile in courage and humility.

A new wave of international scholarship addressing public concerns over bullying is extending into religious communities.
Researchers are discovering that congregations are uniquely positioned to offer the type of social support and the promotion of values such as empathy, forgiveness and love of neighbor that appear to be effective ways of addressing the issue.

Two new studies find that many clergy are both ill-prepared and reluctant to fully engage in end-of-life conversations with terminally ill congregation members and their families. The result, the studies suggest, is that more believers may be spending their final days enduring painful treatments with little chance of success.

A new study analyzing data from 733 U.S. counties encompassing more than 80 percent of the black population revealed that homicide, robbery, burglary and larceny rates all decreased the more people in the county were active in black Protestant churches. And where it can do the most good, in areas with high rates of poverty and unemployment, the black church is doing the most good, the study found.