Can Civilization Survive Without God?
The Pew Forum invited brothers Christopher and Peter Hitchens to address the question of whether civilization needs God.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
The Pew Forum’s Alan Cooperman and Greg Smith, along with Boston University professor and author Stephen Prothero and Krista Tippett of American Public Media, explore key findings from a new Pew Forum survey on how much Americans know about religion as part of a panel discussion at a national symposium on religious literacy in Washington, […]
The Pew Forum’s religious knowledge survey included 32 questions about various aspects of religion: the Bible, Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism, world religions, religion in public life, and atheism and agnosticism. The average respondent answered 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions correctly. Just 2% of those surveyed answered 29 or more questions correctly (including just eight […]
News of scientists’ plans to more actively warn of global warming dangers generated a big response from bloggers last week. And on YouTube, the continuing Philip DeFranco phenomenon illustrates the online platform’s power to turn regular folks into video stars.
The Muslim World League and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth are part of a worldwide network of largely Saudi-funded groups that maintain offices in many Muslim-majority countries as well as in European nations with relatively large numbers of Muslims, such as France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The primary focus of these organizations is […]
Ayatollah Title given to a senior-ranking Shiite religious scholar. Caliphate The line of the Prophet Muhammad’s successors as the temporal and spiritual leaders of Islam after his death in the 7th century. The caliphate existed in one form or another from 632 until 1924, when the Ottoman caliphate officially ended. Cemaat Turkish variation of Arabic […]
This fall’s big story—the 2010 midterm elections—showed little sign of abating last week as some heated campaigns sparked much of the media’s interest. Faulty foreclosure procedures helped make the troubled economy the No. 2 story, while the passing of a milestone in Afghanistan drove coverage of the third-biggest story.