thoughts in and out of season
Another fruit of Vatican II: Catholics who have come of age since then are without sin, or at least don’t think they have anything much to confess. After 40 years of the new springtime in the Church, 42% of Catholics born before 1943 still go to confession at least yearly. Only half as many of … More ...
![[Growing Proportion Outside Christianity]](https://antitechnocrat.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/outsiders.jpg)
Here’s another discussion of social trends related to Christianity, this one relating to the themes about which opposition to Christianity seems to be crystallizing: A New Generation Expresses its Skepticism and Frustration.
From the statistics presented it appears that the long-term trend toward explicit abandonment of Christianity is continuing, with self-described non-Christians now constituting … More ...
Some time ago J. Bottum, now editor of First Things, published a sort of hit piece on T. S. Eliot, What T.S. Eliot Almost Believed, that I just ran into going through some old correspondence.
It’s not clear just what claim Bottum is making in the piece, for example when he says “I … More ...
Truth and beauty enable us to place and orient ourselves in a world that is larger and more full of things that are worthwhile and interesting than the closed system of resources, desires, technology and formal logic that modern thought presents. That’s why contemplation is basic to the good life.
That kind of statement sounds … More ...
America was once a Protestant country. However that may be today, polling results confirm that Catholicism has become an American religion—indeed, as a sociological matter, largely identical to an increasingly secular Americanism. Thus, one recent report finds that 69% of white, non-Hispanic Catholics (compared with 43% of Protestants and 28% of white evangelicals) think … More ...
Or at least something called by that name:
To follow up my recent post on the topic, here are some things I’ve noticed in the past couple of days suggesting that the threat of fundamentalism is not quite as severe as advertised:
While composing my post on Ellul and rummaging around other things I had written, I ran into some comments I had made in in a discussion thread regarding a short essay of mine on liberalism and Christianity. The comments were extensive enough that I thought I’d edit them a bit and post them here, for … More ...
I suppose people could claim things like these are signs of some such:
And so on. Still, there have always been a lot of local revivals and ups and downs, and I keep seeing overall … More ...
John Milbank has a nice clear article for popular consumption on the Church as an organic union of divine and human aspects. The piece goes into nominalism, voluntarism, William of Ockham and what not else, and explicitly says that the mixed and organic nature of the Church should serve as a guide to secular as … More ...