Social and medical sciences are increasingly finding evidence to support how religion promotes better health, including living longer. This voluminous new wave of research is helping both religious communities and medical professionals to understand the promises and pitfalls of the faith-health connection. The potential for science and religion to work together for the common good holds great promise for improving global health during the coronavirus pandemic and beyond.

New evidence indicates every generation in a modernizing country is on average less religious than the previous one. Since children are not only influenced by society, but very strongly also by their parents, a self-reinforcing process is set in motion in which increasingly less religious former generations create ever more secular later generations. The U.S. may be no different.

Fashion is often viewed as frivolous. But the rise of modest fashion shows another side of the industry, the ability of a major social and economic engine to influence cultural change. Today, stylish women of many faiths that encourage modesty have embraced coverings or other relevant adaptions of dress and behavior as signs of fashion and faith. In so doing, this largely women-led movement is breaking down legal and social barriers to religious freedom. Movement luminaries also are engaging the world’s leading religions with the rights of women to interpret religious texts and religious practices in everyday life in ways informed by their own conscience and authority.

Religious communities may have come late to the environmental movement, but they are starting to make a major impact. The landmark encyclical from Pope Francis calling on the world to engage in a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet is one example of a growing religious environmentalism. Amid a global financial downturn, religious groups, with their commitments to both caring for the Earth and human development, are uniquely positioned to help seek ways to develop public policies that balance economic needs with the protection of the planet. But do they have the will, and are people ready to listen?

China finds itself in the midst of a religious revival that is reshaping the global religious landscape in profound ways in the Third Millennium of the Christian era. From confounding expectations that sometime this century Islam may become the world’s largest religion to challenging Western theories of economic growth leading to the obsolescence of faith, China is in the midst of a great awakening that is transforming what once appeared to be the most secular nation on Earth to the leading edge of Christian expansion in the 21st century.

Religion is playing a major role in response to the European economic crisis. As faith-based organizations are increasingly depended upon to meet basic needs, a new landscape of challenges and opportunities is emerging that could result in dramatic shifts in church-state relations. A key question: Can a continent, once seen by many as on an inexorable march toward secularization, create new boundaries between the religious and the secular that respond to social needs in Europe’s increasingly diverse societies?