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Templeton Grant Award:
Measuring Religious Change in the Global East
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We are pleased to announce that Fenggang Yang and Chris White were recently awarded a grant by the John Templeton Foundation for a one-year project entitled “Measuring Religious Change in the Global East.”
 This project aims to develop survey questions to accurately measure religiosity in the Global East, network with scholars of religion in East Asia, and make preparations for a future research study examining the spatial-temporal changes of religion in the Global East. The Global East includes East Asian societies and diasporas around the world that share similar religious traditions upon a cultural or spiritual background of Confucianism. The commonly used indicators of religiosity in many current social surveys were developed primarily to measure religious practice and belief against Judeo-Christian norms; however, in the Global East, traditional notions of the divine and traditional ways of being religious are perceivably different.
This project will take a bottom-up approach by adopting survey questions locally developed in various East Asian societies, construct a survey questionnaire of religion tailored to the Global East, translate it into multiple languages, and test the survey among international students in the US.
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Chinese Christians as a Percentage
of Provincial Population
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Using estimates compiled by researchers at Asia Harvest, this figure depicts the percentage of each Chinese provincial-level administrative division that is estimated to be either Protestant or Catholic. The provinces with the highest estimated percentage of Christians are Zhejiang (18.5%), Henan (14.8%), Fujian (14.3%), and Anhui (14.3%). The populations of Hunan, Ningxia, Sichuan, Tianjin, and Guangxi are all estimated to be fewer than 4 percent Christian. Tibet has the lowest percentage of Christians with less than 1 percent.
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Religiosity, Secularity, and Pluralism
in the Global East
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 A reprint book of a special issue of Religions entitled "Religiosity, Secularity and Pluralism in the Global East," coedited by Fenggang Yang, Francis Jae-ryong Song and SAKURAI Yoshihide, has been officially published. This special issue is a collection of research articles presented at the inaugural conference of the East Asian Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (EASSSR) held last year on July 3-5, 2018 at Singapore Management University. Each participant of the second EASSSR conference “East-West Encounters and Religious Change in Modernizing East Asia,” which was held on July 27-28, 2019 at Hokkaido University in Japan, received a complimentary hardcopy of the book.
The reprint book is freely accessible and downloadable from MDPI Books. In addition, a soft cover copy can be purchased directly from MDPI. Furthermore, it is listed in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), Google Books, and WorldCat, and it will be available for sale from other book distributors as well. |
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