Pentecostals represent a very small proportion of Asia’s population of nearly 4 billion people. This contrasts sharply with pentecostalism’s share of the population in parts of Africa and Latin America, which often exceeds 10-20 percent. According to 2005 figures from the World Christian Database, pentecostals represent 3.5% of Asia’s population, or about 138 million people. […]
Executive Summary By all accounts, pentecostalism and related charismatic movements represent one of the fastest-growing segments of global Christianity. According to the World Christian Database, at least a quarter of the world’s 2 billion Christians are thought to be members of these lively, highly personal faiths, which emphasize such spiritually renewing “gifts of the Holy […]
Age, The. 2006. “India Low-caste Hindus Convert en Masse.”October 15. Anderson, Allan. 2004. An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, Allan. 2005. “The Origins of Pentecostalism and its Global Spread in the Early Twentieth Century.” Transformation 22 (3): 175-185. Anderson, Allan. 2006. “Pandita Ramabai, the Mukti Revival and Global Pentecostalism.” […]
Court says practice is protected by the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act A unanimous Supreme Court ruled today that the adherents of a small religious group can continue, for now at least, to import and use an illegal drug in their worship services. The court, in a decision written by new Chief Justice John Roberts, […]
Parental Notification Case is to be Sent Back to an Appeals Court A unanimous Supreme Court today declined to rule on a New Hampshire abortion statute and instead instructed a federal appeals court to reconsider the statute’s constitutionality. Moreover, the justices determined that the lower court had erred in invalidating the entire law and instructed […]
The Federal Government’s Attempt to Use an Anti-Drug Law to Stop Physician-Assisted Suicide Fails By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court today upheld Oregon’s assisted-suicide law, rejecting an attempt by the Bush administration to use a federal anti-drug law to prohibit doctors from helping terminally ill patients to end their own lives. The decision is […]
Introduction Throughout Europe today, it is not uncommon to see women wearing headscarves and men with skull caps and beards. On many European streets, shops now sport signs in Arabic and other Near Eastern languages and sell an array of exotic looking products from the Middle East and other parts of the Islamic world. Indeed, […]