Apostacy

A late Gnostic document addressing the problems of the corrupt rulers, something faced by the early Christian church.

With discussion of the "Norea", the archetype of Eve and Helen, and Zoe and Pistus Sophia.

From the Gnostic book of writings by Allogenes, this is a document related to the Gospel of the Egyptians.

The warnings of the book of Hebrews are among the most debated passages in regard to interpretation and application. The exact verses vary, depending on which interpreter one references, but are generally seen to be in this range: 2:1-4; 3:7-4:13; 5:11-6:12; 10:26-39 and 12:25-29. The goal of this paper is to explain the given passages, including the audience, nature and results of each warning.

For decades, some Christians have been leaving traditional church settings.  Not all see themselves as leaving Christianity, but are instead choosing different expressions of their faith.  Many different people report many different reasons for leaving, not the least of which are misgivings of some sort.  Others cite a biblical basis for their choice.  Some go to small groups and house churches in addition to large, corporate worship in a church building.  Others have completely abandoned anything that resembles a typical church in the USA and other western, English-speaking nations.

Why are they leaving?  When they leave, where are they going?  While the percentage of Christians in the USA who are worshiping in individual family homes instead of corporately owned structures may be small, it is still a significant number.  Based on a review of extant literature on the subject—paltry though it may be—it can be seen that, much like the New Atheist movement, the house church movement1 in the English-speaking world is predominately a movement of rejection and departure, rather than one of attraction and embracing.

Disgusted with ISIS, some Kurds turned away from Islam following the fall of Mosul in 2014. Many became atheists, while others sought comfort in Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism, according to converts, was the “original” religion of the Kurds before they embraced Islam. In 2015, two Zoroastrian centers opened in Sulaimani, both of which are recognized by the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq. Notably, neither has tried to recreate Zoroastrianism the way it is currently and has been historically practiced in Iran and South Asia. Instead, they have created their own versions of Zoroastrianism, which is nationalist, postmodern, and liberal. Kurdish Zoroastrians argue that the reason Kurds are “backward” is Islam. They seek to rectify the present situation through a Kurdish “authenticated” and “original” form of Zoroastrianism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at these two centers, the present article examines this new religious movement in Sulaimani, an important city in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. It analyses the rise and distinctiveness of Kurdish Zoroastrianism looking at how Zoroastrian Kurds articulate their views on Islam, women’s rights, human rights, and Kurdish independence.

This paper sets out the reasons for my resignation as Licensed Lay Reader after 15 years in ministry in two diocese in the UK. It is intended as a contribution to the debate about whether and, if so, the Emergent Church Movement is an authentic expression of the Faith of Holy Church or a move towards apostasy and chaos. Much of what I write here is unashamedly polemical. I am fighting fire with fire in the hope that it will become a case study of some of the effects of the ECM/ECV in a parochial setting.

Written within a decade of the 1497 general conversion of the Jews in Portugal, Anrique da Mota’s Farce of the Tailor appears, at first glance, to be an overt satire deriding a New Christian: Mota uses the common dramatic form of the mock trial to pass judgement on the religious sincerity of a Jew who was baptized voluntarily. In this article, I will show that, despite its clear tone of condemnation and its comic presentation of the convert, the farce is in fact a very serious polemic on the subject of apostasy that highlights the shame and alienation experienced by voluntary converts, scorned by both the Portuguese Old Christians and those who were baptized by force. As shall be make clear, Mota’s text presents an implicit yet brazen critique of Manueline policy concerning the Jews that has not hitherto been adequately recognized.

A link to a PDF of the full article is available at http://www.mhra.org.uk/journals/PS .

Conversion to Islam is a subject that has attracted a great deal of attention in the media, but has produced very little in the way of reliable quantitative analysis. There is also growing interest in conversion away from Islam, but there appears to be no quantitative analysis of this phenomenon at all. This paper identifies a possible source of data for a quantitative analysis of these two phenomena in Scotland and then generates an estimate for numbers of converts to and from Islam in England and Wales.