Social justice is often identified as a central commitment in mainline Protestant churches in North America. However, it is often approached as a public-facing issue that engages broader society, rather than as a comprehensive value that also informs...
Governments have attempted to contain the COVID-19 outbreak with a variety of regulations, including social distancing, facemask mandates, or limits on gatherings. South Korea was concerned by the “supercluster” case of a sectarian religious organiza...
In the latter half of the twentieth century, Protestant churches in Hong Kong and institutions associated with them played a significant role in the daily lives of the people of Hong Kong. However, the role of ordinary people in the social functions...
This paper reexamines the legacy of Peter Spencer and the African Union Methodist Protestant (A.U.M.P.) Church, challenging the dominant historical narrative that credits the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church as the first independent Black...
This study explores the transformative potential of the traditional Korean concept of uri (we) and the Confucian principle of ren (compassion and resistance), integrated with the biblical tradition of lament, as a theological framework for addressing...
In the last twenty years the Baptist, Methodist, and Waldensian churches in Italy have experienced an important season of migrations, mainly from South America, South-east Asia, and West Africa. This has led to a problem of sharing and mutual influen...
In academic and popular discourses, Poland has been consistently described as a “Catholic country”. However, the level of identification with the Catholic Church in Poland has been gradually declining in the last three decades. In this paper, we expl...
The Korea Christian Action Organization for Urban Industrial Mission (Hanguk-gyohoe-sahoeseongyo-hyeubuihoe (Saseon)) was an organization which devoted itself not only to the Korean democratization movement against the military dictatorship, but also...
Formed alongside the arrival of the first Korean immigrants in Hawaii in 1903, the Korean American Protestant Church has played a significant role in the social, political, and religious lives of Koreans in the United States. However today, membershi...
From the winter of 2024 through the spring of 2025, public plazas in Seoul, particularly Yeouido and Gwanghwamun, became major sites of anti-martial law political mobilization. A striking feature of these protests was the visible leadership and parti...
Between the 16th and 17th centuries, the conservative characteristic of rural environments and mountain communities represented one of the main worries of the Larian Church, which, despite the work of reform of religious customs undertaken by the ord...
The focus of this paper is a suite of Latin papers from 1685, some of which are still unpublished, in which Leibniz writes in the guise of a Catholic in order to defend Catholicism and counter Protestant objections, and this despite him being a lifel...
Millennials are the most analyzed and populous generation in the United States. Collectively, they have been slowly re-shaping the American culture. Protestant Millennials, a subset of this generation, have been ruffling feathers in their local churc...
Since 1945, the Korean Peninsula has remained territorially, politically, and ideologically divided. The South Korean Protestant Church has been profoundly shaped by this historical reality, and its anti-communist discourse has contributed to the con...
Religion and partisanship remain deeply intertwined in contemporary American politics, especially in public debates on religious expression in state institutions. This study examined whether religious identity and behavior continue to influence publi...
Almost twenty years have passed since the end of John Paul II’s pontificate. The Roman Catholic Church in Poland faces a serious crisis, stimulated not only by secularisation processes, which are characteristic for Western Europe, but also by a...
Low competitiveness is a common denominator of historically Roman Catholic countries. In contrast, historically Protestant countries generally perform better in education, social progress, and competitiveness. Jesus Christ described the true and fals...
Beginning with Kelley’s and Iannaccone’s foundational studies, scholars have examined how strictness impacts congregational outcomes. This paper seeks to further develop the strict church thesis by examining Iannaccone’s concept of “optimal level of...
This paper builds upon and extends Christian and legal scholarship on the civil rights movement by illuminating a climate of religious freedom that served as a catalyst for and was integral to the success of the spirited activism of the civil rights...
Exploring the roles and activities of Australian Baptist women is essential to present a complete history of the Australian Baptist denomination. Many historical narratives do not include women’s work in the denomination despite their numerical...
The Reformed Church in Hungary is a Reformed Protestant church in terms of its confession of faith, in which both adjectives, Reformed and Protestant, are emphasized. From this formulation follows the critique and firm rejection of a form of organiza...
The smallest, but in some ways the most influential, church to emerge from the Hussite Reformation was the Unity of the Brethren founded by Gregory the Patriarch in 1457. The Unity was a voluntary church that separated entirely from the established c...
This article addresses determinants of the ecumenical impetus’ weakening in the second half of the twentieth century. This situation invokes a key question about the purpose of the ecumenical journey. Despite the complexity and multiplicity of...
The new millennium has seen increased hostility to Israel among many progressive constituencies, including several mainline Protestant churches. The evangelical community in the US remains steadfastly Zionist, so overall support for financial aid to...
Devotions in the Ancient Way of Offices was first published as a Catholic primer for worship between intimates, then reformed for individual Protestant worship, and then reformed again for Protestant worship between intimates. Each adaptation engages...
Amidst the plethora of approaches to ecumenical dialogue and church reunion over the last century, a common theme has been the depreciation of the classic Protestant distinction between the “visible” and “invisible” church. Of...
Since the arrival of Protestants in Brazil, the presence of Protestant educational institutions became a reality. Seminaries were founded at the end of the 19th century, focusing on the training of clergy without much concern for dialogue with other...
The impact of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Reform movement on the ecclesiastical censorship of science, philosophy and magic has been an enduring theme in the historiography of early modern Italy. In this paper, I consider how the Church&r...
During the 1970s’ military dictatorships in Chile and Brazil, the Catholic Church took the position of moral opposition to the authoritarian regimes, while in Argentina, the Church sided with the dictatorship. In his pathbreaking book utilizing...
After half a century of formal equality regarding ministry in Protestant churches, female leaders have become increasingly common in Protestant churches in Western Europe and North America. However, in Hungary—and in East-Central Europe in gene...
There are several studies looking into the differences between state-run and church-run schools in the recruitment and retention of their teachers. In Hungary, where teachers of church-run schools do not have to meet any special official requirements...
Objective: To examine the effect of religion on negative attitudes and beliefs about suicide. Methods: We use data from a large nationwide survey conducted in Hungary covering more than 3000 individuals. Suicide-related stigmas are captured with thre...
In Cuba and the United States, Protestant institutions exist that are both reflective and nonreflective about their culture’s influence on belief and practice. The case of Cuba sheds light on how Christian churches and voluntary associations op...
In many North American Protestant circles, especially those with Baptist or Free Church roots, the notion of the total separation of church and state is presented as the ideal to be attained in all church and state relations. We are told that the sta...
A growing number of Protestant missionaries engaged in vernacular education in the late nineteenth century. To meet the demands of the new era, Christian church education faced challenges not only in its curriculum design but also in the way it prese...
This article takes up the question of how the Poor Waldensians of Lyon, a predecessor of the medieval Franciscan movement, managed to become one of the main Reformed ecclesiastical bodies starting from the sixteenth century. The Italian Waldensians a...
Any pandemic disorganizes the life of wider society. One of the manifestations of social activity is religious life. Despite progressing secularization, both religion, churches, and denominational associations have an impact on individual ethical cho...
The question of women’s ordination to offices within churches, and in particular to the ministry of word and sacrament, gave rise to one of the major ecclesiological debates of the modern era. In common with other contested issues during this p...
This article analyzes Pentecostal churches in Paraguay and Chile, tracing how their older ethos of politics as worldly and corrupt is gradually changing and why. It explores changing church–state relations and conceptions of political culture a...
The unity of the Persons of the Trinity is the source and highest exemplar of Christian unity which all ecumenical initiatives seek. During his earthly ministry, our Lord Jesus Christ prayed for the unity of Christians (John 17:21). This prayer of Je...
There is an ongoing debate about whether Christian theology has had positive or negative effects on the natural environment. Included in this debate is the role of Christian missions acting in colonial environments. This article investigates the rela...
The COVID-19 pandemic has paralyzed entire social levels. Organized religion is one of those levels, having suffered a lot due to the closing of churches and the automatic physical cessation of religious services. Both the weekly practitioners and th...
Over the last twenty-five years, the rural U.S. Midwest has undergone dramatic demographic changes as the population of white people decreased in many areas and the number of Latinos surged. These shifts are especially noteworthy in areas that had st...
End-of-relationship rituals are not respected within Protestant churches. Therefore, many church websites emphasize that there are no official divorce rituals to this day. This is despite the fact that there are numerous impulses for divorce rituals,...
Since World War II, the countries of Western Europe have gradually gone towards economic, social, and political integration. This was influenced by states, institutions, social partners, and churches. The Christian trade unions also contributed to th...
Once one of the most popular Catholic pilgrimage sites in England, The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, now under the care of the Anglican Church, operates as a site of devotion, but it also operates as a site of memory. In this essay, I will argue...
In a recent publication, I introduced the theoretical framework of neosecularisation with regard to the Orthodox Church and society in Bulgaria. I argued that neosecularisation, as a complex process of decline of religion’s importance and the h...
This article draws upon doctoral case study data from two Protestant Christian churches to examine how contemporary worship music-making practices can reinforce and solidify the musical tastes, dispositions, and tendencies of particular demographics....
The relationship between Korean Protestantism and society at large can be divided into three parts in terms of the religion’s participation in society following the Korean Peninsula’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule: (1) conservati...
This paper examines views of women among the most prominent “progressive” American religious groups (as defined by those that liberalized early on the issue of birth control, circa 1929). We focus on the years between the first and second...
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