Portal:Religion
The Religion Portal
Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. It is an essentially contested concept. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacredness, faith, and a supernatural being or beings. (Full article...)
Vital article
A new religious movement (NRM), also known as a new religion, is a religious or spiritual group that has modern origins and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin, or they can be part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing denominations. Some NRMs deal with the challenges that the modernizing world poses to them by embracing individualism, while other NRMs deal with them by embracing tightly knit collective means. Scholars have estimated that NRMs number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most NRMs only have a few members, some of them have thousands of members, and a few of them have more than a million members. (Full article...)
Did you know (auto-generated)
- ... that the nonconformist minister Ichabod Chauncey was banished from England under the Religion Act 1592 and spent two years in exile in Holland where he published a defence of his actions?
- ... that the capital of South Ossetia once had more Jews than Ossetians?
- ... that religious studies scholar C. Jouco Bleeker believed that religions are like acorns?
- ... that Freedom of Religion South Africa filed an unsuccessful lawsuit to keep child spanking legal?
- ... that fictional religions, often described in speculative fiction, have in some cases inspired real religious movements?
- ... that the author of the comic book Timeless Voyage was the leader of a UFO religion?
Religious debates over the Harry Potter series of books by J. K. Rowling are based on claims that the novels contain occult or Satanic subtexts. A number of Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox Christians have argued against the series, as have some Muslims. Supporters of the series have said that the magic in Harry Potter bears little resemblance to occultism, being more in the vein of fairytales such as Cinderella and Snow White, or to the works of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, both of whom are known for writing fantasy novels with Christian subtexts. Far from promoting a particular religion, some argue, the Harry Potter novels go out of their way to avoid discussing religion at all. However, the author of the series, J. K. Rowling, describes herself as a Christian, and many have noted the Christian references which she includes in the final novel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. (Full article...)