More on the Recession and Church Finances

From the Kansas City Star on 26 February.

New Reports on Religious Freedom and the Religious Blogosphere

Two reports of interest appeared on the Internet recently.

The first is a report from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs called "Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy." It is a bit long, so you might want to just read the executive summary at the beginning.

The second is a report called "The New Landscape of the Religion Blogosphere" by the Social Science Research Council. Unfortunately, this blog did not make it into the report. What an oversight!

Many Recent Events

Too many to say too much:

• The USCIRF is accused of an anti-Muslim bias in the Washington Post.
• The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a U.S. group that seek increased separation of church and state, is lobbying the federal government to end tax breaks for ministers.
• A church that mixes Eastern Orthodoxy with Evangelical Christianity.
• Pew releases a study on the religious attitudes of the millennials.
• A group unhappy with current trends in the Lutheran Church has unveiled plans to form a rival, the North American Lutheran Church (NALC), which will promote traditional teachings.
  

A New Religion in India?

You can read about it here. Of course, not everyone is in favor of its forming.

French Parliamentary Report Recommends Burqa Ban in Public Places

Here is CNN's summary of this story.

Religious Regulation in the News

Religious regulation has been big in the news lately.

• The transcript for a discussion of the Pew Report on Global Restrictions on Religion has been posted online. The transcript is long but gives some excellent context for the report.
  
• Open Doors released its World Watch List, which ranks countries where persecution of Christians is the worst.
• The Center for Religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University released a document that explores 35 questions related to religion in politics and public life. It is titled Religious Expression in American Life: A Joint Statement of Current Law.
• The December 2009 Newsletter of the Association of American Law Schools included a 35-page bibliography of articles, books, and websites on law and religion from 2009.
  
• Following his recent predecessors, President Obama declared January 16th Religious Freedom Day.
  

Wrapping up 2009 and Looking Toward 2010

Time to wrap up the 2009 year with some big religion stories.

1. The Pew Forum released this month a big study on religious regulations around the world. Here is the executive summary. The big item was that an estimated 70% of the world's population live under high or very high religious regulations.
2. For the fifth year in a row, the United Nations passed a resolution against religious defamation, yet support for this is declining each year. The main criticism of the resolution is that it can be used to support the suppression of some minority religious groups whose members speak out against persecutions enacted by member of other religious groups.
3. These two stories are mentioned in this Economist Magazine article.
   
4. Another Pew Forum study on trends in American's religiosity. In short, there is a lot of switching and mixing. Here's a Wall Street Journal article on it.
   

Putting the year in perspective is Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, which posted online their annual roundtable on the major religion stories during the past year, and Howard Friedman of ReligionClause.blogspot.com, who gives his Top-10 Religious Liberty Developments of 2009.

Religion & Ethics Newsweekly also gives a look ahead to 2010.

End-of-quarter Thoughts on the Blog

I welcome your feedback on the value of the blog. Please take a few minutes to answer the following questions.

1. Which one or two blog posts did you like the most?
2. What did you like about the blog? What did you not like about it?
3. In what ways did the blog contribute to the class, if any?
   
4. Would you come back to visit this blog later even though you will not be a student in the class?
   

Any other comments are appreciated as well. If there is interest, I can continue to post stories even though the class has ended. I have enjoyed our interaction on the blog, and I hope it has contributed to your understanding of the economics of religion.