From the Editor: Studying Religion in a Rapidly Changing World

Among other things, this issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion illustrates a variety of ways in which our world (and often religion within it) changes rapidly in the present era. Just a year ago, who among us would have believed that Donald Trump would become the nominee of the Republican Party to run for U.S. president, and that he would have done so with the unlikely support of more than a few faith-based constituencies? Who would have foreseen the monumental “Brexit” vote in the United Kingdom, or the religion-relevant themes of xenophobia that seem to have surrounded it? Who might have foreseen the sad confluence of events in less than one summer week this year, which saw the deaths of Elie Wiesel—“the Holocaust’s greatest witness” (Nir and Correal 2016)—and close to 200 victims of ISIL-related attacks in Istanbul, Dhaka, and Baghdad? Karl Barth is credited with the observation that Christians should keep their Bible in one hand and their newspaper in another. I’d recast that observation a bit for our purposes by saying that perhaps we should keep both eyes focused on theory and data, but also take more than the occasional glance at (reputable) news sources. This issue’s rich and varied set of articles reflects a standard scholarly focus on building theory with good data, but it also is thoroughly relevant to events and trends in our world today.