[RedBeaconNY]

BTTT

[exnavy]

Great read.

[Vaquero]

nature abhors a vacuum. So what is filling it?

ISLAM!

now doesn't that suck.

[Russ7]

My sense is that there is a turn around happening that many libs are not seeing or ignoring.

There have to be "canaries in the mineshaft" that we can look at that might indicate if there is truly a shift going on. A couple of things that pop into my head are the $$ generated by Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ" movie. How about the "Chronicles of Narnia" movie. How about sales of the "Catechism of the Catholic Church"?

We've had 2 generations of folks who have gone on "non-catechized" but the newer generation of religion teachers are more faithfull to the truth than in the past and this is resulting in parents questioning beliefs they have held and now think could be wrong.

When Catholic seminary applicants no longer have to pledge they will support women priests as a prerequisite to entrance, things are improving.

[Mrs. P]

"If you started to think about your life as a woman, the first thing you would do is reject Christianity."

If one of these feminist babes had a husband who treated her like a real husband is supposed to treat a wife, according to Biblical teaching, she would think she had died and gone to heaven. OTOH, they probably think the whole idea of heaven is oppressive, so forget all that.

[RoadTest]

America's founders foresaw all this:

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending
with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice,
ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of
our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution
was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly
inadequate to the government of any other."

-- John Adams (Address to the Military, 11 October 1798)

[Louis Foxwell]

Nice post.
The author speaks as one outside the church with little understanding of the nature of religion. He would prefer the anti-culturalists of the 60's to have been reformists. But that could not have happened. That is asking the institutions of religion to stop being religious.
There was a self-consciousness in the 60's and 70's among Christians based on their moral commitments. The challenge that religion had become stuffy and status quo was valid. Christians knew it and were embarrassed. Matters spun out of control. Radicals and extremists took over the field and spouted their aantiestablishment tirades. The church was nonplussed.
Today matters are very different. The religious establishment has grown through the moral crisis of the mid 20th century. There is a new depth of understanding of religious life in this new century. Genuine leadership is being taken by religious conservatives in the very areas of human rights that anti-religionists have ruled over for 40 years. The forces of chaos are being pushed back. Christians are no longer self conscious about past moral ambiguities. They have largely been resolved and the church is more prepared than ever to stand in the center of the struggle for moral society.
The pendulum is swinging away from the influence of those who would destroy human dignity in the name of human dignity and toward those icons that stand the test of history as the bulwarks of a strong, healthy society.

[redgolum]

Ping for later.

[VOA]

bump

[The Iguana]

The Extremely Smart People (TM) seem not to realize that their secularized unbelief is in fact very much the exception in the long journey of the human race.

It mainly affects a certain slice of the post-modern West, which makes thema very small minority in the world today (and shrinking). When you add in the dimension of time...this phenomenon - even traced back to the Enlightenment - shrinks even more.

But at the rate they are non-reproducing themselves into nonexistence, it may be a moot point before long.

P.S. For all the supposed sterility of the "1950's" Catholic Church - I would take the overly casuistic, neo-scholastic, suburban conformity of that period to what's replaced it in the chicest locales. Encrusted faith beats nihilism any day.

[Clemenza]

In Washington State, 28% of the population is "non-religious" making them the largest "religious grouping" in the state.

[narses]

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