 | |
| Type | News agency |
|---|---|
| Industry | Media |
| Founded | 1934 |
| Founders | Louis Minsky |
| Website | https://religionnews.com |
Religion News Service (RNS) is a news agency covering religion, ethics, spirituality and moral issues. It publishes news, information, and commentaries on faiths and religious movements to newspapers, magazines, broadcast organizations and religious publications. It was founded in 1934.
RNS was founded in 1934 by journalist Louis Minsky as an affiliate of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Everett R. Clinchy was the managing editor and co-founder. [1] [2]
RNS was acquired by the United Methodist Reporter in 1983, by Newhouse News Service in 1994, then by the Religion Newswriters Foundation in 2011. [3]
In April 2015, the Catholic News Agency published an article disclosing that RNS had received a grant of $120,000 from the Arcus Foundation with the stated intent “to recruit and equip LGBT supportive leaders and advocates to counter rejection and antagonism within traditionally conservative Christian churches”, also questioning if the grant had biased RNS's coverage of traditional religion. [4] In response, RNS's then editor-in-chief Kevin Eckstrom said that the grant language is “Arcus’ description of their funding, not ours” and denied that the grant had any influence over editorial decisions at RNS. [5]
Freedom of religion or religious liberty is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or community, in public or private, to manifest religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance. It also includes the freedom to change one's religion or beliefs, "the right not to profess any religion or belief", or "not to practise a religion".
The Christian right, or the religious right, are Christian political factions characterized by their strong support of socially conservative and traditionalist policies. Christian conservatives seek to influence politics and public policy with their interpretation of the teachings of Christianity.
Religious discrimination is treating a person or group differently because of the particular beliefs which they hold about a religion. This includes instances when adherents of different religions, denominations or non-religions are treated unequally due to their particular beliefs, either by the law or in institutional settings, such as employment or housing.
Christianity is the most widely professed religion in the United States, with Protestantism being its largest branch, although the country has rapidly secularized in recent years. According to the World Values Survey in 2017, the United States is more secular than the median country; they ranked the United States the 32nd least religious country in the world. A large variety of faiths have historically flourished within the country. Until the 1990s, the United States was a substantial outlier among other highly developed countries: uniquely combining a high level of religiosity and wealth, although this has lessened significantly since. The majority of Americans believe in a higher power. According to Gallup, 45% reporting praying on a daily basis and 41% reporting that religion plays a very important role in their lives. A majority of Americans report "seldom" or "never" attending religious services; 31% report attending religious services weekly or near weekly. Trust in "the church or organized religion" has declined significantly since the 1970s. According to the Pew Research Center and Gallup, 21-29% of Americans describe themselves as not being affiliated with a religion, a spectrum ranging from materialistic forms of hard atheism to indifference to religion to forms of spirituality that deviate from or do not involve participation in traditional organized religious structures.
Religion in the United Kingdom, and in the countries that preceded it, has been dominated for over 1,400 years by various forms of Christianity, replacing Romano-British religions, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon paganism as the primary religion. Religious affiliations of United Kingdom citizens are recorded by regular surveys, the four major ones being the national decennial census, the Labour Force Survey, the British Social Attitudes survey and the European Social Survey.
Religion in Norway is dominated by Lutheran Christianity, with 68.7% of the population belonging to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Norway in 2019. The Catholic Church is the next largest Christian church at 3.1%. The unaffiliated make up 18.3% of the population. Islam is followed by 3.4% of the population.
Religion in Israel is manifested primarily in Judaism, the ethnic religion of the Jewish people. The State of Israel declares itself as a "Jewish and democratic state" and is the only country in the world with a Jewish-majority population. Other faiths in the country include Islam, Christianity and the religion of the Druze people. Religion plays a central role in national and civil life, and almost all Israeli citizens are automatically registered as members of the state's 14 official religious communities, which exercise control over several matters of personal status, especially marriage. These recognized communities are Orthodox Judaism, Islam, the Druze faith, the Roman, Armenian Catholic, Maronite, Greek Catholic, Syriac Catholic, Chaldean, Greek Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic and Anglican churches, and the Baháʼí Faith.
The majority religion in Azerbaijan is Islam, though Azerbaijan is the most secular country in the Muslim world. Estimates include 96.9% and 99.2% of the population identifying as Muslim. Most are adherents of Shia Islam (55-65%), with a minority (35-45%) being Sunni, differences traditionally have not been defined sharply.
The Lebanese people are the people inhabiting or originating from Lebanon. The term may also include those who had inhabited Mount Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon Mountains prior to the creation of the modern Lebanese state. The major religious groups among the Lebanese people within Lebanon are Shia Muslims (27%), Sunni Muslims (27%), Maronite Christians (21%), Greek Orthodox Christians (8%), Melkite Christians (5%), Druze (5.2%), Protestant Christians (1%). The largest contingent of Lebanese, however, comprise a diaspora in North America, South America, Europe, Australia and Africa, which is predominantly Maronite Christian.
Positive Christianity was a movement within Nazi Germany which promoted the belief that the racial purity of the German people should be maintained by mixing racialistic Nazi ideology with either fundamental or significant elements of Nicene Christianity. Adolf Hitler used the term in point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform, stating: "the Party as such represents the viewpoint of Positive Christianity without binding itself to any particular denomination". The Nazi movement had been hostile to Germany's established churches. The new Nazi idea of Positive Christianity allayed the fears of Germany's Christian majority by implying that the Nazi movement was not anti-Christian. That said, in 1937, Hans Kerrl, the Reich Minister for Church Affairs, explained that "Positive Christianity" was not "dependent upon the Apostle's Creed", nor was it dependent on "faith in Christ as the son of God", upon which Christianity relied, rather, it was represented by the Nazi Party: "The Führer is the herald of a new revelation", he said. Hitler's public presentation of Positive Christianity as a traditional Christian faith differed. Despite Hitler's insistence on a unified peace with the Christian churches, to accord with Nazi antisemitism, Positive Christianity advocates also sought to distance themselves from the Jewish origins of Christ and the Christian Bible. Based on such elements, most of Positive Christianity separated itself from traditional Nicene Christianity and as a result, it is in general considered apostate by all mainstream Trinitarian Christian churches, regardless of whether they are Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant.
The Catholic Church in Germany or Roman Catholic Church in Germany is part of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church in communion with the Pope, assisted by the Roman Curia, and with the German bishops. The current "Speaker" of the episcopal conference is Georg Bätzing, Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Limburg. It is divided into 27 dioceses, 7 of them with the rank of metropolitan sees. All the archbishops and bishops are members of the Conference of German Bishops. Because of the church tax and also because of its substantial real estate holdings and other sources of income, it has an approximate net worth of $26 billion, making it the wealthiest part of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church and the second wealthiest religious organization in the world in its own right.
Salvatore Joseph Cordileone is an American prelate of the Catholic Church and the archbishop of Archdiocese of San Francisco in California since 2012. He previously served as bishop of the Diocese of Oakland in California from 2009 to 2012 and as an auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of San Diego in California from 2002 to 2009.
Neopagans are a religious minority in every country where they exist and have been subject to religious discrimination and/or religious persecution. The largest neopagan communities are in North America and the United Kingdom, and the issue of discrimination receives most attention in those locations, but there are also reports from Australia and Greece.
Azerbaijan is a multicultural and multi-religious country and a secular country. The article 48 of The Constitution of Azerbaijan states that the right to liberty and the right of people of all faiths may choose and practice their religion without restriction is ensured. Article 18 of the Constitution of Azerbaijan states that religion acts separately from the state affairs and the government. People of all beliefs are equal before the law and the propaganda of any religion, including Islam, while majority of the population is Muslim, is still prohibited strictly as a case of contradicting humanism.
The Constitution provides for freedom of religion; however, the Government restricted this right in practice.
Catholic News Service (CNS) is an American news agency owned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) that reports on the Catholic Church.
Islam is the state religion of Saudi Arabia. The government of Saudi Arabia has been criticized for its restrictions on religious freedom. Law requires citizens to be Muslim, and, public worship by adherents of religions other than Islam is forbidden. Any non-Muslim foreigner attempting to acquire Saudi Arabian nationality must convert to Islam. Furthermore, Hanbali is the official version of Sunni Islam and adherence to other sects is restricted. According to a 2012 online poll by WIN-Gallup International, 5% of 502 Saudi Arabians surveyed stated they were "convinced atheists".
The Arcus Foundation is an international charitable foundation focused on issues related to LGBT rights, social justice, ape conservation, and environmental preservation. The foundation's stated mission is "to ensure that LGBT people and our fellow apes thrive in a world where social and environmental justice are a reality."
In the United States, a religious freedom bill is a bill that, according to its proponents, allows those with religious objections to oppose LGBT rights in accordance with traditional religious teachings without being punished by the government for doing so. This typically concerns an employee who objects to abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, civil unions, or transgender identity and wishes to avoid situations where they will be expected to put those objections aside. Proponents commonly refer to such proposals as religious liberty or conscience protection.
Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, 593 U.S. ___ (2021), was a United States Supreme Court case dealing with litigation over discrimination of local regulations based on the Free Exercise Clause and Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The specific case deals with a religious-backed foster care agency that was denied a new contract by the City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, due to the agency's refusal to certify married same-sex couples as foster parents on religious grounds.
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