I've just finished doing some assignments for my sociology class, and one of the assignments centered around religion. What was interesting about this assignment were the different resources that I needed to visit to answer some of the questions. As I'm sure I will want this information again at some point in the future, and there may be some ofyou out there interested in the information offered by a number of websites, I thought I would post some of them here.
- Adherents.Com [http://www.adherents.com/] is a useful starting point for using the web to survey religion around the world. There is a tremendous amount of information at this easy-to-use website. This site has a great listing of the world's major religions, along with major branches of religions and who has how many churches in the United States. If you are looking for numbers, this is the site to check out.
- The Virtual Religion Index provides a huge amount of information on the variety of religious traditions that exist, including some great resources for the history of religions.
- The Academic Info's Religion in America page [http://www.academicinfo.net/amrelig.html] offers a broad range of nicely-annotated links. I visited the Divining America link to read about Islam in America. Good teaching assistant site.
- The Religious Movements website, maintained by sociologist Jeffrey Hadden at the University of Virginia, offers much food for thought about “new” religious movements, often labeled sects or cults. The link takes you to an alphabetical listing of religious group profiles.
- Finally, take the Quiz over at NOW with Bill Moyers about separation of church and state. I have to say that a couple of the answers were a little suprising.
Hope you find some of these interesting.