Word: barretts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Until the Rev. Dr. David B. Barrett realized his pioneering mission, many important questions about the world's religions could not be answered. Is Christianity really growing? What percentage of the world's population is atheistic? What percentage is Jewish? Muslim? Barrett believed that the answers to these and similar questions should no longer, in this age of telecommunications, jet travel and computer analysis, remain a matter of faith. Some 14 years ago, huddling with church demographers in Nairobi, Kenya, Barrett launched a project that many churchmen around the world thought would take a virtual miracle to pull...
...result, published in a fact-crammed, 1,010-page volume by Oxford University Press, is nothing less than a tour of considerable force: the World Christian Encyclopedia. Although the bulk of Barrett's information concerns Christianity, it also provides a rich assortment of data on all of the world's great faiths. It has LIFE magazine-size pages, endless charts and graphs, numerous illustrations and enough credibility in its facts, conclusions and methodology to make it a bench mark in our understanding of the true religious state of the planet. Even for as zealous a researcher as Barrett...
...volume opens with a global analysis of Christianity, a chronology of 1,300 key events in the spread of the Christian faith since A.D. 27, and a 66-page explanation of Barrett's methods and definitions. It also offers a dictionary of terms, a Who's Who, and a comprehensive list of names and addresses of religious agencies under 76 categories. Interspersed with all that are 31 tables of global statistics, some of which cover a time span from A.D. 30 to the year 2000. Here one can discover, for instance, the number of literate and nonliterate Christians...
...What Barrett and his demographers have discovered is sure to prove invaluable to churchmen and scholars everywhere. But it will also trigger new controversies. For example, Barrett concludes that Brazil, the world's biggest Catholic country, in fact has 11.4 million people on the Catholic rolls who are really Protestants, and 60 million who dabble in the worship of spirits...
...Islam, the population today-Africa's largest-is 49% Christian and 45% Muslim. South Korea demonstrates the world's most dramatic Christian revival: the churches are growing by 6.6% a year, fully two-thirds through conversions rather than the birth rate. By the end of the century, Barrett projects, South Korea will be 42% Chris tian. The U.S. is the most disparate nation of all, Barrett concludes, with 2,050 denominations for its 161 million Christians, plus myriad non-Christians. It has the largest population of Jews in the world, 7.1 million. Between 1900 and 2000, classical Protestantism...