A group of Icelanders turns to a particularly ancient religion for apparently mundane reasons. The religiosity of religious leaders in Germany and Britain are compared. And the pantheon of deities in Chinese folk religion (also called Shenism or Shenjiao) is examined. It's Faithful Friday, our weekly segment on news about faiths and religious communities from around the world! All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!
Zuism, a reconstruction of ancient Sumerian polytheism has unexpectedly taken off in Iceland. Why? Well, it might well be a tax avoidance scheme.
Do Christians and Muslims worship the same god? Not everyone will agree, but Christian blogger Benjamin L. Corey argues they do, even if they differ about specific and significant points of theology.
Britain and Germany are both in many ways very similar: European parliamentary democracies that predominantly speak a Germanic language and feature a population roughly evenly divided between the irreligious and Christians. But as The Economist notes some of the differences between Britain and Germany come out in how their leaders deal with said divisions.
Are all Muslims the same? That certainly seems to be the message many in the West would like to believe. But it's just not so, either now or historically, argues historian Tithi Bhattacharya in this article for The Huffington Post.
What do you know about the pantheon of Shenism (also known as Shenjiao or Chinese folk religion)? If you're looking to learn more about China's dominant religion or simply to refresh what you already know, check out this blog post going over the pantheon in detail.
Top image by Bernard Gagnon