Welcome!

Welcome to the blog section of BRIN – newly integrated into the main site.

This section of the site reports on new releases of religious data. It will also flag up interesting new publications, policy reports or news stories using religious data.

In December the following were released.

Church of England Finance and Ministry Statistics

… which among other things reports that the total income of parishes rose well above inflation in 2007, while 574 new clergy were ordained in 2008. The Church of England reported that clergy numbers were generally ‘buoyant’. See more on the Church of England website here.

An interesting survey was conducted on awareness of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, with results publicised last month. The survey was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, which was founded by the York chocolatier and philanthropist Joseph Rowntree. It’s unusual in being a comparatively large survey  into attitudes towards one of the smaller denominations. An article and more detailed presentation are available here in the weekly Quaker magazine The Friend: ‘Seeing ourselves as others see us’.

A third interesting release was the Pew Forum’s measures of government religious restrictions, and of social hostilities with religious aspects, for 198 countries. The Government Restrictions Index was based on 20 separate measures and the Social Hostilities Index on 13. To find out how the UK scored, and how the measures were created, have a look at the Pew Forum website.

More to come!