The bad news for Southern Baptists is that the denomination, the nation’s largest Protestant group, shrunk in 2023, with a drop of about a quarter-million people. The good news, according to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual statistical report, is that the decline slowed from 2022. In addition, of those who remained, more went to church and more newcomers took the plunge to get baptized. (Smietana, Religion News Service)
Read MoreKnown as the church tax, or Kirchensteuer, it can equate to 9 per cent of a person’s total income tax bill and forms the backbone of church finances in Europe’s largest economy. It is imposed on Catholics, Protestants and Jews, and many newcomers to the country unwittingly end up paying it after declaring their religious affiliation while completing documentation required to register their address. (Luyken, The Telegraph)
Read MoreThe age of “priests driven by liberal politics and progressive theology, so common in the 1960s and ’70s,” is indeed seemingly on its way out; the rising generation of American priests are often politically moderate, but their theology is orthodox and their liturgical impulses are conservative. Douthat, The New York Times)
Read MoreA rabbi in upstate New York is intent on reclaiming his congregation’s cemetery, a “holy space” where dozens of headstones were desecrated recently. Rafi Spitzer, rabbi and spiritual leader at Congregation Agudat Achim, a synagogue in Schenectady, “almost burst into” tears after seeing the extent of the damage done to the headstones to the cemetery. (Encinas, USA Today)
Read MoreMillions of Indian voters across 93 constituencies were casting ballots on Tuesday as Prime Minister Narendra Modi mounted an increasingly shrill election campaign, ramping up polarizing rhetoric in incendiary speeches that have targeted the Muslim minority. (Pathi & Saaliq, AP News)
Read MoreTurkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan formally opened a former Byzantine church in Istanbul as a mosque on Monday, four years after his government had designated it a Muslim house of prayer, despite criticism from neighboring Greece. (AP News)
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