SINGLES, CHURCHES CAN TAKE SEPARATE PATHS: Louisville Courier-Journal

feature:

When Steven Schafer looks out over his small congregation on Sunday mornings, he sees a picture of modern American family life.

About half of the congregants come from what was once typical — families headed by married couples.

The rest include “a lot of single parents, a lot of divorced parents, a lot of grandparents raising their kids,” said Schafer, pastor of Ridgewood Baptist Church in Pleasure Ridge Park. “The traditional family is not the norm.” That presents a major challenge to churches, which are struggling to respond to the revolution in how Americans structure their families, households and romances.

Nearly half of American adults today aren’t married — whether never-married, currently divorced, separated or widowed, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Married couples account for just under half of all American households — down from 71 percent in 1970, according to the U.S. Census.

Yet still today, married people are more likely than singles to attend church. And churches often seem focused on the nuclear family, whether it’s in the sermon topics, the posters on the walls or the graded Sunday schools.

The Rev. Kevin Cosby, pastor of St. Stephen Church, said his congregation is trying to create a culture in which “you’re not abnormal if you’re single.”

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Labels: Christianity, cohabitation, culture, Marriage, religion, single parenting, singles, unmarried parents

posted by Eve at 11:54 AM VOTE

DAN SAVAGE WAS RIGHT: Joshua Gonnerman

at First Things online [and more-than-usually removed from our normal topics here, but I thought people would like to see this --E]:

...And yet, in the rush to (rightly) condemn, conservative responses have often overlooked the fact that Savage was on to something. In the past year, commentators including Elizabeth Scalia, Melinda Selmys, and Mark Shea have written articles to present the gay community as something other than simply an enemy. Each made clear their adherence to orthodox sexual ethics, but each nonetheless received a venomous response from many of their Christian readers. ...

Thus, the first line of response conservative Christians offer to the pastoral problem of homosexuality is to try to get rid of the problem through ex-gay ministries or reparative therapy; thus, Christian protest to the Uganda bill was half-hearted at best; thus, the concern for Christians over gay bullying has been minimal, and some Christians have even organized opposition to the opposition of gay bullying. The guiding principle is not the distinction between sexual activity and orientation, but their conflation into lifestyle or identity, and so those who are targeted for being or seeming to be gay are given only the most abstract support for their profoundly concrete humiliation.

Last year, Biola professor Matt Jenson addressed students in chapel (like Savage’s address, also available on YouTube). After calling Christians to accountability for failing to make a real space for single people, he turns to the question of homosexuality. “The church is right to tell gay people the good news and call them to a life of discipleship, if and only if it is willing to live as their family.” If Christians have any interest in reaching out to the gay community, if we have any hope to speak a message which can touch their hearts as well, we absolutely must be willing to live as their family. Behind his blundering obscenity, behind his facile attempts to explain Scripture away, behind the blatant hypocrisy of his behavior toward those who disagree with him, what Dan Savage means to tell us is, “The church has far too often, and for the most wrong-headed reasons, failed to be family to gay people.”

And he’s right.

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Labels: Catholic Church, Christianity, culture, Dan Savage, homosexuality, religion

posted by Eve at 10:59 AM VOTE

MARRIAGE: NOT A RIGHT, BUT AN OFFICE: Elizabeth Scalia

at First Things:

Speaking as they do to equal access to a sacrament, last Sunday’s verses from Acts 10 might have seemed, to those fixating on the question of same-sex marriage, like something of a rebuke to the Catholic church and her bishops:

Then Peter proceeded to speak and said, “In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him. . . Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people, who have received the Holy Spirit even as we have?”

Here we see Peter endorsing inclusivity; following the example of the Christ who interacted with all, the church—through the authority of Christ and the workings of the Holy Spirit—offers Life-in-Christ to all. If all proclaiming Christ are accepted to baptism, one might wonder, then why not all to marriage?

I think it comes down to offices, and the equality to be found therein. We talk about vocations and “one’s state in life,” but I wonder if we would not better serve both clarity and charity by considering that beyond baptism we are called to an Office. Since all Offices are callings, then all servants are equal within them and each office is lived within the fundamental calling of all baptized people, which is to chastity, first and foremost.

This brings home the barely-recognized fact that, except for those called to the Office of Marriage—who are themselves meant to be chaste within that Office—the rest of the world, the majority of humanity walking about, gay or straight, are meant to resist sexual concupiscence, whether within the Office of Singleness or Religious Consecration. ...

Why does this Office get all the fun? Because, while all offices are equal, the Office of Marriage—far from being “for everyone” or a simple expression of a mood subject to change—is one of especial humility and sacrifice. The essentials of procreation residing within us are so powerful that unless one ardently works to prevent it, new life will come (a recent study found that 54% of abortions stem from contraception “failure”). The little bang of sperm and ova are the microcosmic reflection of the macrocosmic big bang of Creation; co-operating with God in the continuance of that creation means humbly accepting—for the rest of one’s life—involvement and responsibility for specific human beings of varied gifts and challenges. There are no days off; if you don’t like your job, you can’t just move away; you can’t re-staff. Parenthood contains moments of surreal bliss countered by a lifetime of work, self-abnegation, stress, and anxiety. Besides procreation, sexual tenderness in marriage brings a depth of consolation meant to balance out the fullness of that burden or—for a childless couple—the pain of longings unfulfilled.

For the rest of the world—the majority who are called to chastity—what are they meant to do within their Offices? Serve God and others by helping the helpless and companioning the lonely; feeding the hungry; comforting the frightened; really listening to another, even when we’d rather not. In other words, precisely the same things the married folks do, but without the extra gifts, responsibilities, and stresses of children, and without the consolation (and life-creating complications) of sexual intimacy.

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Labels: Catholic Church, chastity, Christianity, culture, gay marriage, heterosexual couples, Marriage, religion, sex

posted by Eve at 11:25 PM VOTE

SOME BURKEAN THOUGHTS ON SAME-SEX MARRIAGE: Rod Dreher

blogs:

...My non-religious opposition to SSM comes from a Burkean point of view. That is, I do not believe that we should be so quick to revolutionize and to deconstruct the traditional family, which has endured for so long, and has been so key to the cohesion of our civilization. The “traditional family” (one man + one woman, bound exclusively) is not a natural fact; it is an achievement of civilization. As sociologist Carle Zimmerman shows in his historically-based “Family and Civilization,” the traditional family is a historical artifact that provides a unique basis for human flourishing — this, versus the “trustee family” (the clan, including polygamous ones), or the atomized family, which is the ultimate product of individualism. Zimmerman, a Harvard sociologist, doesn’t make religious arguments — indeed, one gets the idea that he is not religious at all — but rather observes the connection between ways of seeing the family and the individual, and the decline of ancient Greece and Rome. The book is too complex to get into in detail here, but this is a passage from a column I wrote about it some years back:

Civilization depends on the health of the traditional family.

That sentiment has become a truism among social conservatives, who typically can’t explain what they mean by it. Which is why it sounds like right-wing boilerplate to many contemporary ears.

The late Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman believed it was true, but he also knew why. In 1947, he wrote a massive book to explain why latter-day Western civilization was now living through the same family crisis that presaged the fall of classical Greece and Rome. His classic “Family and Civilization,” which has just been republished in an edited version by ISI Press, is a chillingly prophetic volume that deserves a wide new audience.

In all civilizations, Zimmerman theorized, there are three basic family types. The “trustee” family is tribal and clannish, and predominates in agrarian societies. The “domestic” family model is a middle type centering on the nuclear family ensconced in fairly strong extended-family bonds; it’s found in civilizations undergoing rapid development. The final model is the “atomistic” family, which features weak bonds between and within nuclear families; it’s the type that emerges as normative in advanced civilizations.

When the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, the strong trustee families of the barbarian tribes replaced the weak, atomistic Roman families as the foundation of society.

Churchmen believed a social structure that broke up the ever-feuding clans and gave the individual more freedom would be better for society’s stability and spent centuries reforming the European family toward domesticity. The natalist worldview advocated by churchmen knit tightly religious faith, family loyalty and child bearing. From the 10th century on, the domestic family model ruled Europe through its greatest cultural efflorescence. But then came the Reformation and the Enlightenment, shifting culture away from tradition and toward the individual. Thus, since the 18th century, the atomistic family has been the Western cultural norm.

Here’s the problem: Societies ruled by the atomistic family model, with its loosening of constraints on its individual members, quit having enough children to carry on. They become focused on the pleasures of the present. Eventually, these societies expire from lack of manpower, which itself is a manifestation of a lack of the will to live. ...

Why? Zimmerman was not religious, but he contended the core problem was a loss of faith. Religions that lack a strong pro-fertility component don’t survive over time, he observed; nor do cultures that don’t have a powerfully natalist religion.

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Labels: Christianity, conservatism, culture, demographics, extended family, family structure, gay marriage, natalism, religion

posted by Eve at 11:22 PM VOTE

FOES OF VANDERBILT'S NONDISCRIMINATION POLICY POINT TO HARVARD: The Tennesseean

reports:

When Vanderbilt wanted its freshmen students to learn about ethics, the school turned to the late Rev. Peter Gomes to teach them. Gomes’ book, The Good Life, was required reading for the Vanderbilt class of 2015.

Now some critics of Vanderbilt’s nondiscrimination policy hope the school will turn to Gomes, a Harvard professor who died last year, once again.

In 2003, a Christian group at Harvard called the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship ran afoul of that school’s nondiscrimination policy because it required its leaders to hold specific beliefs.

Harvard’s administration told the group to change its ways or leave campus. But Gomes, a professor and minister of the Memorial Church at Harvard, defended the student group, saying the university was discriminating against it.

“How can a profession of faith be irrelevant in the leadership of a faith-based group?” he wrote in a 2003 letter to the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper.

Harvard eventually backed down.

Elliot Huck, a Vanderbilt freshman from Bloomington, Ind., hopes his school will do the same.

Huck is a member of Cru, also known as Campus Crusade, one of about a dozen groups that will probably lose their status as registered student organizations because it, too, requires its leaders hold specific beliefs.

Vanderbilt insists that the groups drop their requirement or lose their status.

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Labels: Christianity, culture, religion, religious liberty, universities

posted by Eve at 12:22 PM VOTE

THE FUTURE WILL BE MORE RELIGIOUS AND CONSERVATIVE THAN YOU THINK: Eric Kaufmann

in The American:

As the 2012 presidential election grows closer, voter demographics will grab ever more airtime. In a finely balanced electorate, switching parties is less common, making internal growth of party bases more important. Getting the vote out is one aspect of this; population change another. ...

All of which explains why pundits' interest in demography has been steadily rising. Ruy Teixeira, for instance, claims that the growth of the college-educated, secular and Hispanic proportion of the population will soon provide the Democrats with an inbuilt electoral majority. Chris Bowers of the Nation styles this the “End of Bubba Dominance.” On the other side of the ledger, American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks highlights the role of fertility: “Liberals have a big baby problem: They're not having enough of them, they haven't for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result.” “In Seattle,” adds Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation, “there are nearly 45 percent more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19 percent more kids than dogs.”

In order to adjudicate between these competing predictions, I teamed up with Vegard Skirbekk and Anne Goujon, two leading Austrian-based experts in the art of projecting the size of subgroups in populations. The results, published in the journal Population Studies, show that Democrats are only marginally younger than Republicans and Republican women bear the same number of children as their Democratic sisters. Immigration, however, is an important factor. If ethnic party identification remains as it is, Latino population growth will benefit the Democrats, shifting the balance between the two parties by two and a half points in the Democrats’ favor over the next 30 years. ...

Those who doubt whether demography can shape politics should consider world Jewry. The combination of religious polarization and demographic upheaval is especially stark among Jews. They began to secularize in large numbers in the 19th century, and Orthodoxy emerged to combat this trend. The temperature of Jewish fundamentalism increased sharply after the horrors of World War II, and an ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, community emerged, segregating itself from other Jews. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, and the largely secular Zionist leadership assumed that the black-hatted, sidelocked Haredim were a relic of history. They gave the ultra-Orthodox an exemption from the draft, subsidies to study at yeshiva, and other religious privileges to make sure their anti-Zionism didn't dissuade the Great Powers from establishing a home for the Jews in Palestine. In 1948, there were only 400 Israeli Jews with military exemptions, many of which were not used. By 2007, that number had soared to 55,000. Meanwhile, the fringe of ultra-Orthodox pupils in Israel's Jewish primary schools in 1960 has ballooned: they now comprise a third of the Jewish first grade class. They are gaining power: in Jerusalem, Haredim rioted in late December, demanding the right to segregate women on buses, and have already elected the city's first Haredi mayor. Outside Israel, work by Joshua Comenetz and Yaakov Wise reveals that the ultra-Orthodox may form a majority of observant American and British Jews by 2050.

The Jewish example shows that population change can reverse secularism and shift the center of gravity of an entire society in a conservative religious direction. Notice that change has come about because values have polarized people and increasingly determine family size.

In a more modest way, the same is true elsewhere.

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Labels: Christianity, culture, demographics, Europe, immigration, Islam, Israel, Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 7:43 PM VOTE

MODERN YOUTH MINISTRY A "50-YEAR FAILED EXPERIMENT," SAY PASTORS: Christian Post

reports:

A group of pastors and former youth ministry leaders suggest that today's youth ministries should be disbanded, calling the common practice of separating congregations by age for worship and Bible study "unbiblical."

The church leaders state their case in the documentary film, "Divided: Is Age-Segregated Ministry Multiplying or Dividing the Church?"

The film is produced by the National Center for Family Integrated Churches in association with LeClerc Brothers Motion Pictures. The producers released the documentary earlier this month online, and have made it available for free until Sept. 15.

"Divided" follows "edgy twenty-something" Christian filmmaker Philip LeClerc on a quest to find answers to why his generation is increasingly turning away from attending church. Recent surveys have shown that as many as 85 percent of young people will leave the church and many never return.

NCFIC Director Scott T. Brown told The Christian Post that today's modern concept of youth ministry is a "50-year failed experiment." Brown said that when he was a church leader in the '70s and '80s he could have been the "poster boy" for the youth ministry movement in California. However, he said he now feels that dividing children from adults at church is an unbiblical concept borrowed from humanistic philosophies. ...

"I look back and realize I did more harm to families than I ever imagined," Dellinger says in the film. "I see that more as I look back because I was usurping the authority of parents, especially fathers by having their children's hearts turn towards me – with their permission."

more (and a more critical look here)

Labels: adolescence, Christianity, culture, emerging adulthood, Fathers, religion

posted by Eve at 9:06 PM VOTE

MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY: Michael S. Horton

in Modern Reformation:

Among the contradictions of my childhood experiences in churches was the fact that, on one hand, there was the famous portrait of Jesus by Warner Sallman—meek and mild verging on the effeminate—and, on the other hand, the appearance of various sports figures to remind us that Jesus was not just male but a man's man who ran the moneychangers out of the temple with a whip.

It is hardly a newsflash that we've been living through an era of upheaval in gender roles. Churches have been divided over the role of women in ministry. In "Young, Restless, Reformed" circles, a new generation is discovering Jonathan Edwards and "masculine Christianity" in one fell swoop. Weaned on romantic—even sentimental—images of a deity who seems to exist to ensure our emotional and psychic equilibrium, many younger Christians (especially men) are drawn to a robust vision of a loving and sovereign, holy and gracious, merciful and just, powerful and tender King. As David Murrow pointed out in Why Men Hate Going to Church (2004), men are tired of singing love songs to Jesus and don't feel comfortable in a "safe environment" that caters to women, children, and older people. His critique is familiar to many: men don't like "conformity, control, and ceremony," so churches need to "adjust the thermostat" and orient their ministry toward giving men tasks (since they're "doers"). Men don't like to learn by instruction; they need object lessons and, most of all, to find ways to discover truth for themselves. ...

In the drive to make churches more guy-friendly, we risk confusing cultural (especially American) customs with biblical discipleship. One noted pastor has said that God gave Christianity a "masculine feel." Another contrasted "latte-sipping Cabriolet drivers" with "real men." Jesus and his buddies were "dudes: heterosexual, win-a-fight, punch-you-in-the-nose dudes." Real Christian men like Jesus and Paul "are aggressive, assertive, and nonverbal." Seriously?

The back story on all of this is the rise of the "masculine Christianity movement" in Victorian England, especially with Charles Kingsley's fictional stories in Two Years Ago (1857). D. L. Moody popularized the movement in the United States and baseball-player-turned-evangelist Billy Sunday preached it as he pretended to hit a home run against the devil. For those of us raised on testimonies from recently converted football players in youth group, Tim Tebow is hardly a new phenomenon. Reacting against the safe deity, John Eldredge's Wild at Heart (2001) offered a God who is wild and unpredictable. Neither image is grounded adequately in Scripture. With good intentions, the Promise Keepers movement apparently did not have a significant lasting impact. Nor, I predict, will the call of New Calvinists to a Jesus with "callused hands and big biceps," "the Ultimate Fighting Jesus."

Are these really the images we have of men in the Scriptures? Furthermore, are these the characteristics that the New Testament highlights as "the fruit of the Spirit"—which, apparently, is not gender-specific? "Gentleness, meekness, self-control," "growing in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ," "submitting to your leaders," and the like? Officers are to be "apt to teach," "preaching the truth in love," not quenching a bruised reed or putting out a smoldering candle, and the like. There is nothing about beating people up or belonging to a biker club.

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Labels: Christianity, culture, gender, men, religion

posted by Eve at 9:10 PM VOTE

EVERYTHING BUT SEX; EVERYTHING BUT DIVORCE: David French

at The Corner:

I’ve written before about Evangelicals’ collapsing sexual mores, and now I see now that the Religion News Service is on the case and repeating many of the same statistics: Eighty percent of young Evangelicals have premarital sex, and almost a third of pregnancies end in abortion. This is a grave cultural problem within the church (along, of course, with the Evangelical divorce rate). ...

But why are we doing so much worse now? I tend to think it’s a logical result of the “everything but” culture that’s overrun much of the church. In other words, “We Christians live just like you, but without the sin.” Our dating relationships are the same. Our goals for marriage are the same. Our cultural habits are the same. Everything thing is same . . . except (hopefully) for the sin. Let’s take dating. The Christian church has bought hook, line, and sinker the notion that we should wait to marry until either our education is complete or we’ve attained a certain amount of subjective financial stability (whatever comes later). This results of course in a demand for an incredibly extended commitment to chastity — a “15-year gap between the average onset of puberty and the average age of marriage.” Similarly, within the world of Christian marriage, it’s impossible to overstate the extent to which healthy marriage is discussed within secular frameworks of happiness and fulfillment, with scripture providing the holy means for gaining secular ends.

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Labels: abortion, Christianity, culture, evangelical Protestantism, Marriage, premarital sex, religion, sex

posted by Eve at 12:13 AM VOTE

WHY THE RIGHT CAN'T WIN THE GAY MARRIAGE FIGHT: Daniel McCarthy

at The American Conservative:

With the war in Afghanistan not yet over and the economy still reeling from the Great Recession, who would have predicted that 2012 would be the year of social issues? But so it is proving to be, between Rick Santorum’s surprisingly strong performance in the Republican primaries, the Obama administration’s mandate for employer-provided health insurance to cover contraception, and—in a series of battles in legislatures from New Jersey to Maryland—the ongoing struggle over same-sex marriage. Where the last is concerned, polls indicate that while more Americans still oppose gay marriage, the majority that does so is dwindling rapidly. ...

How has this happened? The gradual triumph of gay marriage is not merely due to a legal change that began 20 years ago or even to the sexual revolution of a half-century past; rather it is a consequence of a shift in the foundations of Western civilization that has been taking place over centuries—a shift from Christian to liberal foundations. So profound is this transformation that even the opponents of same-sex marriage are not exactly fighting to recover the old way of life.

To understand how marriage has changed, and not changed, over the course of Western history one can hardly do better than turn to Harvard sociologist Carle Zimmerman’s Family and Civilization as a primer. First published in 1947, it remains an invaluable, indeed prophetic, guide to the marriage debate and wider culture wars. While same-sex marriage may be an absolute novelty, there have been pitched battles over the definition of marriage before, as when the Catholic Church told the barbarians who had overtaken the Roman Empire that they could not continue their practices of cousin marriage—a tradition from time immemorial—if they wished to be Christians.

Indeed, as Zimmerman writes, “in the course of seven or eight centuries the family system of Europe had twice completely reversed its trend” thanks to the Church, which first reformed the socially atomistic conjugal practices of the late Romans before tackling the blood-bound “trustee” families of the invading tribes. “This struggle, one of the most interesting in the history of the Western family, is relatively unknown to us today,” though it was a matter of civilization-shaping importance at the beginning of European Christendom.

The balance between the social extremes of atomism and tribalism could only be maintained as long as the Church was the primary authority responsible for marriage—which it was for over a thousand years. “The barbarian family had to be broken away from clan influences and brought under that of the church,” writes Zimmerman, but “if temporal forces and strong states could take from the church its power, rule, and regulation of the family, then the atomistic type could reappear. Actually, this is what happened.”

Even Zimmerman could not have anticipated same-sex marriage, but he might not have been surprised by it. As Christianity has lost its power in public life, so too have the forms of marriage and family that it established given way to new configurations shaped by the institutions and ideologies that hold power today—specifically, liberalism and the modern state. But did liberalism, with its bedrock principle of legal equality for all individuals, have to lead to gay marriage?

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Labels: Christianity, conservatism, culture, discrimination law, gay marriage, gay/straight differences, homosexuality, Lawrence v. Texas, liberalism, religious liberty

posted by Eve at 9:38 PM VOTE

ABSTINENCE IS DEATH: Storied Theology

blogs:

In an interview with Christianity Today Christine Gardner talks about the language that Evangelicals use to talk about abstinence. Gardner’s book is entitled, Making Abstinence Sexy–a telling encapsulation of how Evangelical abstinence are striving to affirm the culture’s obsession with sex–and visions of abundant, great sex in particular–while giving it a distinctive, Christian veneer:

They are using the very thing they are prohibiting to admonish young people to wait. They are saying, “If you are abstinent now, you will have amazing sex when you are married.”

Holy non sequitur, Batman! Gardner thinks that Christianity has something to offer that has been largely missing from these abstinence campaigns:

Language of sacrifice and suffering can be transformative to those who know that sex sells everything from cars to deodorant and, now, abstinence.

I think she’s getting close. Abstaining from sex is suffering, dying to the desires of our bodies. In a world where people are regularly remaining single into their thirties and beyond, it’s death with no this-worldly promise of new life. Perhaps reframing abstinence as participation in the cross of Christ is better preparation for marriage than the promise of great sex on the other side.

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Labels: abstinence, Christianity, culture, Marriage, premarital sex, religion, sex

posted by Eve at 6:08 PM VOTE

"REVERTS" COME BACK TO THE RELIGIONS OF THEIR CHILDHOODS: USA Today

feature [too fluffy for my taste--I really like the focus on the positive call of a faith (and on Confession!), but would have liked more exploration of how people overcame the negative aspects which led them to leave in the first place. Still, good focus on something which often gets left out of stats-based stories on religious "churning." --Eve]:

Bruce Boling will celebrate Easter Sunday this weekend among Southern Baptists, just as he did when he prayed at a tiny Kentucky church where his family filled half the pews.

After decades away from faith, "I slowly began to see what I was missing was the relationship with God that I could find in my church," says Boling, 45, settled in with a little Baptist congregation in Hendersonville, Tenn.

Lydia Scrafano's heart will again thrill to hear Catholic hymns sounding on a great pipe organ, just as she did as a child in Detroit.

"I missed it all. I missed taking communion with a priest. I missed the stained glass. I missed the Virgin Mary," says Scrafano, 55, who has reconnected with her faith through a Catholic church in Williamsburg, Va.

Like many Christians and Jews, Boling and Scrafano drifted — or marched — away from the religion of their childhood.

Then, unlike most, they came back.

And they came back to stay, not just to parachute in for the Easter celebration this Sunday or a Passover Seder meal Friday night — holidays fundamental to Christianity and Judaism.

According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, more than half of Americans say they've switched religions at least once, but just 9% of U.S. adults say they've returned to the pews, practices and prayers that shaped them.

They're not converts; they're reverts. And religious denominations are stepping up efforts to reclaim, re-energize — and sometimes re-educate — these fallen-away faithful.

Catholic churches are adding adult programs to focus on returnees who often fear their actions or choices will keep them from the sacraments, the essential rites of Catholicism. Evangelical churches steer reverts to group Bible studies to help them establish stronger religious roots.

Rabbis reach out person-to-person to young adults through a program called "Next Dor" (dor is Hebrew for generation). It's promoted by Synagogue 3000, a consortium of leaders from Reform and Conservative movements, the two largest branches of Judaism in the USA.

Several Catholic dioceses have reported post-Christmas or post-Easter attendance bumps after major advertising efforts, such as a "Catholics Come Home" media campaign launched in Phoenix in 2008.

The Archdiocese of Washington pushed to increase confessions during Lent — the 40 days preceding Easter — by opening church and chapel doors on Wednesday evenings. Their advertising slogan: "The Light is ON for You." Within five years, the campaign spread across the country as more bishops adapted the idea for their dioceses.

But are they staying?

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Labels: Catholic Church, Christianity, culture, evangelical Protestantism, Judaism, religion

posted by Eve at 9:55 PM VOTE

FAITH AND THE DUTY WORK OF FATHERING: Jerry Park

at Black, White, and Gray:

...When it comes to religion and daily life then, few things are more applicable than the simple day-to-day routines of being a parent. How do moms and dads live out their faith when it comes to bringing up baby? Believe it or not, there’s not a lot of research out there on this point given that these two social institutions of family and religion are so fundamental to society. So it surprised me when one of the only religion studies to show up last year in the top sociology journals tackled this very topic. Alfred DeMaris, Annette Mahoney, and Kenneth Pargament examined data derived from 169 English-speaking married couples in a Midwestern US city that were in their third trimester and attending childbirth classes as they awaited the birth of their first child. Unlike other studies, the couples were not interviewed once, but 4 different times at the 4th, 7th and 13th month. They accomplished this for every couple between 2005 and 2008.

Daily tasks in infant care included the following: changing “poopy” diapers, changing wet diapers, putting the baby to sleep, getting the baby dressed, bathing, getting up at night to care for the baby, feeding, soothing when in distress, and play. It’s exhausting just reading that list isn’t it? So they used this as a way to determine whether religion helps dads become more involved and thus reduce the “gender gap” in infant care.

The researchers asked each parent how much he or she did of the aforementioned tasks, and then asked them to rate their spouse on his or her task accomplishments. Further they introduced questions that one doesn’t normally see in surveys. They asked a series of questions that tap into what they call “theistic sanctification” which refers to their view of whether God played a large or no role in the pregnancy, delivery and care of their baby. Their second unique measure refers to “spiritual investment” which picks up on each spouse’s view of their religious behavior regarding their child (e.g. “I have prayed for my unborn child”).

They also included other important characteristics such as “spouse’s knowledge of infants,” infant temperament, marital satisfaction, and a key scale, “sex-role traditionalism,” an established set of questions that identifies whether each spouse has a fairly traditional view of the roles & responsibilities in the relationship (e.g. wives are nurturing, more involved in the private sphere and subordinate in the relationship). God bless these couples for answering all these questions.

The upshot: no effect for theistic sanctification on infant care. Sigh. As they conclude: “In sum, all these efforts revealed only one consistent effect: The more religious the couple, the greater the gender gap ‘in favor’ of moms” (363). For those not familiar with this kind of language the quotations mean this: more religious couples usually exhibit greater infant care from the mom rather than a leveling out between mom and dad. Further they state, “To the extent that religiousness promotes a traditional gendered division of labor with respect to child care, then, our evidence suggests that it hinders rather than furthers the goal of gender equality in parenting.” (365) ...

What do you think about their implications? If father involvement is a priority for Christians, what sort of ways could Christian communities get more faith-informed dads to be more involved in baby duty? (doodie?)

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Labels: babies, Christianity, culture, Fathers, gender, gender differences, motherhood, parenting, religion

posted by Eve at 7:39 PM VOTE

FROM THE DEFENSE SPEECH IN "THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV"

"...But, gentlemen of the jury, one must treat words honestly, and I shall allow myself to name a thing by the proper word, the proper appellation: such a father as the murdered old Karamazov cannot and does not deserve to be called a father. Love for a father that is not justified by the father is an absurdity, an impossibility. Love cannot be created out of nothing: only God creates out of nothing. ...No, let us prove, on the contrary, that the progress of the past few years has touched our development as well, and let us say straight out: he who begets is not yet a father; a father is he who begets and proves worthy of it. Oh, of course, there is another meaning, another interpretation of the word 'father,' which insists that my father, though a monster, though a villain to his children, is still my father simply because he begot me. But this meaning is, so to speak, a mystical one, which I do not understand with my reason, but can only accept by faith, or, more precisely, on faith, like many other things that I do not understand, but that religion nonetheless tells me to believe. But in that case let it remain outside the sphere of real life."

Labels: biological parenthood, childhood, children, Christianity, culture, Fathers, parenting, religion, satire

posted by Eve at 1:13 PM VOTE

OLDEST LIVING COUPLE ON EARTH GIVES GREAT RELATIONSHIP ADVICE: YourBlackWorld

Twitter interview:

Meet Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher of North Carolina. They have been married 85 years (86 in May) and hold the Guinness World Record for the longest marriage of a living couple and get this…. Zelmyra is 101 years old and Herbert is 104.

The happily married couple teamed up with twitter this Valentine’s Day to answer some relationship questions. Check out their take on finding love, getting through hard times and more. Good read. ...

6. What are the most important attributes of a good spouse?

Zelmyra: A hard worker & good provider.The 1920s were hard,but Herbert wanted & provided the best for us.I married a good man! ...

8. You got married very young – how did u both manage to grow as individuals yet not grow apart as a couple?

“Everyone who plants a seed & harvests the crop celebrates together” We are individuals, but accomplish more together.

9. What is your fondest memory of your 85-year marriage?

Our legacy: 5 children, 10 grandchildren, 9 great-grandchildren, and 1 great-great grandchild.

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Labels: aging, children, Christianity, culture, Marriage, religion

posted by Eve at 1:06 AM VOTE

BLACK PASTORS TAKE HEAT FOR NOT VIEWING SAME-SEX MARRIAGE AS A CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE: The Washington Post

reports:

All of a sudden, they are bigots and haters — they who stood tall against discrimination, who marched and sat in, who knew better than most the pain of being told they were less than others.

They are black men, successful ministers, leaders of their community. But with Maryland poised to become the eighth state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage, they hear people — politicians, activists, even members of their own congregations — telling them they are on the wrong side of history, and that’s not where they usually live. ...

Thomas, 61, says a couple of young women in his church told him that maybe it’s not so bad to allow two women to join together because, in many cases, men are not in the home.

His booming voice softens: “We do have a flat tire in our community when it comes to marriage and men in the household. But do we flatten the other three tires to move forward, or do we work on fixing the flat tire? Do we give up on the lack of strong black men leading our households and justify another change in our social structure?” ...

The battle over same-sex marriage, for Thomas and Carr, is not so much about homosexuality as about a growing belief that biblical principles should not be the basis for governing.

“Take the word ‘marriage’ out of this bill, and we’re pretty much in agreement,” Thomas says. “Everyone should have full legal rights and would have them with civil unions. You wouldn’t see me down there protesting against civil unions. The state is the state, and the church is the church. I understand that. But put the word ‘marriage’ in there, and now you’re redefining something that is in the Bible and in our principles as one man and one woman. Why do you need to use a biblical word in a civil situation? ...

Over and over, the ministers return to the image that some supporters of same-sex marriage have painted of the church as hater. “There is not one of us who doesn’t have persons in our family with that lifestyle,” Thomas says. “And I tell them, ‘You are still mine.’ ” His voice cracks; he halts for a moment. “You are flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. No, I will not discriminate against him. We are a people of mercy. But the state may not tell me that I must sanction his behavior, just as I may not sanction behavior of the adulterer or the liar.”

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Labels: Christianity, culture, gay marriage, homosexuality, Marriage, Maryland, men, race, religion

posted by Eve at 12:53 AM VOTE

IN DEFENSE OF VALENTINE'S DAY: Matthew Schmitz

at First Things' blog:

St. Valentine’s Day gets a bad rap, and very unfairly, I think. I’d like to take a moment to counter some of the most common objections. ...

3. The convention objection. Another reason many balk at Valentine’s is that it reminds us of a truth that should be obvious in any case: we mate conventionally. Despite a tremendous, decades-long effort to liberate sexuality from social bonds and the habits of culture, love and sex are as scripted as ever. We don’t speak of the hookup “culture” for nothing: it’s no more spontaneous than the courtship rituals of the old English countryside. We have to be open to sex but be careful about things “getting personal.” We say we want “random play” but we still follow social cues and fret about public appearances. It’s a confused state to be in, and Valentine’s, with its public rituals of flower delivery and dinner dates, is a healthy (if unwelcome) reminder that convention still rules.

4. The sentimental objection. This is the objection I find most convincing. Many say that Valentine’s contributes to an unattainable, Disneyfied idea of romantic love (and sex and marriage) as goods necessary for any fulfilled life. Such an exalted view makes it necessary that all people who are to live fully enter into marriage. Further, people must be able to enter into marriage with someone to whom they are personally and physically attracted (hence the need to extend marriage to same-sex couples despite the fact that those people were always free to marry opposite-sex partners). I’ll admit that Valentine’s has played its part in promoting this profound inversion of the Pauline counsel. We indeed do need to affirm the quotidian nature of marriage, to insist that it is valid and binding after the fire has gone out. And we need to do much more to honor the richness of a life free from eros, let alone sex. But this doesn’t require that we reject wholesale the ideal of courtly love. Indeed, Chaucer’s character in the Parliament of Fowls outlines the ways of romance even while suggesting it’s a possibility somehow closed off to him. We need not all participate in an ideal to applaud it.

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Labels: Christianity, culture, Marriage, religion

posted by Eve at 10:32 PM VOTE

MORE PROTESTANTS OPPOSE BIRTH CONTROL: NYTimes

"Beliefs" column from last month:

...Certain religious groups tend to have large families, whether for reasons of religious observance, as with some Jews, or because it is culturally approved, as in Mormonism. But 50 years ago, large families were unusual in evangelical Protestantism. A Santorum-size family would have been seen as a marker of exotic, sinister religiosity. Big families were stigmatized: they were for immigrants and Catholics, or for the rural poor.

Since then, however, there has been a shift in evangelical thinking about contraception, and therefore about big families. You can see it in the Duggar family, the enthusiastic Santorum supporters who star on the reality television show “19 Kids & Counting.” You can read about it in books like “Quiverfull,” Kathryn Joyce’s 2009 account of Christians who forgo contraception to add children to the Lord’s army. And you can hear it in the teachings of theologians like Russell D. Moore, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary dean who warns evangelicals to be skeptical of the “contraceptive culture.”

From the beginning of Christian history until the 19th century, the teaching held that contraception was sinful, says Allan Carlson, the author of “Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973.” “ ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth’ — until the 1920s, all Protestants formally read that as being a ban on contraception,” Dr. Carlson says, “and all Protestants held to the Christian convention that birth control was sinful, for the same reason and in the same way abortion was.”

But that consensus “started to break down in the 1920s,” Dr. Carlson says. The Church of England accepted birth control in 1930, and American Protestant bodies soon followed. As recently as “10 or 20 years ago,” Mr. Santorum’s rejection of birth control “would have been an immediate no” for nearly all Protestants.

Today, however, even those evangelical Protestants who use contraception — the vast majority, it would seem — have developed a cultural respect, in some cases a reverence, for those who do not.

“For evangelicals, an anticontraception position is not seen as exclusively Roman Catholic, as it would have been in the past,” said Jenell Paris, who teaches anthropology at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. She pointed to several developments in evangelical culture to explain this shift.

“Our understanding of hormonal birth control methods — the pill, the patch, the ring — have changed,” said Dr. Paris, alluding to those who believe, on scant evidence, that these methods of birth control can contribute to long-term infertility. “Abortion politics have changed. Views of women in the workplace have changed. Feminism has changed. All that has contributed to a number of evangelicals embracing a no-birth-control policy, or at least making it comprehensible.”

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Labels: abortion, Christianity, contraception, culture, family size, feminism, religion

posted by Eve at 12:29 AM VOTE

FAILING TO CONNECT THE DOTS ON CONTRACEPTION: Howard P. Kainz

at First Things:

...One thing the GOP debate illustrates dramatically is the broader cultural sea change that has taken place in regard to contraception. It may seem that the “catalyst” for this change in attitude was simply the invention of the contraceptive pill in the early 1960s, which was far more convenient than existing methods of birth control. But even before such convenient methods surfaced, contraception in previous decades had become progressively more in vogue, even for Christians who had previously strenuously opposed it. The following March 22, 1931 editorial of the Washington Post in the aftermath of the 1930 Episcopalian Lambeth Conference, which spearheaded the acceptance of contraception for Protestants in the U.S., is absolutely inconceivable today:

It is impossible to reconcile the doctrine of the divine institution of marriage with any modernistic plan for the mechanical regulation or suppression of human birth. The church must either reject the plain teachings of the Bible or reject schemes for the “scientific” production of human souls. Carried to its logical conclusion, the committee’s report if carried into effect would sound the death-knell of marriage as a holy institution, by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be “careful and restrained” is preposterous.

Anyone reading the Post today would consider this a forgery or the result of Internet hacking. But such was once the majority opinion, reflected by the paper. But little by little, almost all Protestant denominations fell in line.

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Labels: Catholic Church, Christianity, contraception, culture, gay marriage, Marriage, religion

posted by Eve at 12:27 AM VOTE

In Los Angeles, Lifting Up the Fatherless: George F. Will

in the Washington Post:

The worst day of Sugar Bear’s 55 years was one of the days — there have been many of them — when he got out of prison. In the early 1990s, in a prison where people whose sentences have ended and are being released see those whose sentences are just beginning, he saw one of his sons coming in.

Generational recidivism is not unusual in Sugar Bear’s world of fatherlessness. His son, who was convicted of selling drugs, is still incarcerated because he has not been a model prisoner. He is an apple that did not fall far from the tree. ...

Although he has never been married, he has five children. He has been shot only once. He says he “did juvenile time” but managed, largely because he was an athlete, to graduate from high school. After that, he was incarcerated five times, for sentences ranging from six months to 11 years. He says he was implicated in “a 187” — murder of a corrections officer — but was exonerated. Then his life’s gyrations intersected with some benevolent institutions.

In 1965, immediately after the Watts riots that announced to a largely oblivious nation the volatility of some pockets of social regression, a UCLA undergraduate, Keith Phillips, moved into this devastated section of the city of angels. Now 65, Phillips is the reason why World Impact, his creation, is a presence in 13 of America’s most troubled cities, such as Newark and East St. Louis. Its focus is on fatherlessness and the social pathologies that flow from it.

This is the preoccupation of Ken Canfield, 58, a Kansas State Ph.D. who, until five years ago, headed the National Center for Fathering in Kansas City. He then moved here to help Pepperdine University develop a Center for the Family, and he now labors with World Impact living among the city’s most troubled people. Canfield acquainted Sugar Bear with Psalm 68, which speaks of God as “father of the fatherless” who “setteth the solitary in families.” For people like Sugar Bear, people with holes in their souls never filled by the love of fathers, Canfield says religion offers the “spiritualization of fatherhood”:

“If you don’t have the calm self-respect that a father gives, your passions go sideways. For a number of men, their passions become sexualized as they look for comfort and affirmation of their manhood.”

On a recent day, Sugar Bear, a burly, cheerful survivor, was wearing a windbreaker bearing the logo of the Union Rescue Mission. He works there, helping provide services to, among others, a small portion of L.A. County’s 50,000 homeless, 30 percent of whom are under 35.

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Labels: Christianity, culture, Fathers, men, religion

posted by Imapp Staff at 4:35 PM VOTE