Last month, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) unveiled a new brand strategy to address America’s needs, as well as a name change to “the Y.” After surveying “a cross section of Americans to learn more about the most pressing issues and challenges facing their communities today,” the Y had found that only 51% of Americans were optimistic about the future while 49% were not.

“This is a very important, exciting time for the Y,” said Neil Nicoll, president and CEO of YMCA of the USA. “For 160 years, we’ve focused on changing lives for the better”¦ . People are concerned about the problems facing their communities. Like the Y, they understand that lasting change will only come about if we work together to improve our health, strengthen our families and support our neighbors. Our hope is that more people will choose to engage with the Y.”

Problems? Change? Hope? This “new brand strategy” is a puzzle. While the Y’s written mission still declares putting, “Christian principles into practice through programs,” the newly rolled-out strategy does not mention the change and hope found in Christ.

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A new billboard is going up in Raleigh and five other North Carolina cities with a seemingly innocuous slogan superimposedon an image of the American flag: “OneNation Indivisible.”

It’s what the slogan doesn’t say that may bother some people.

Since 1954, the Pledge of Allegiance has split those three words to include two others: “under God.”

But this billboard was paid for by N.C. Secular Association, a coalition of nonbelievers and agnostics. Their message: We’re Americans, too.

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No question, the Times’s worldview is secularist and secularizing, and as such it rivals the Catholic worldview. But that is not unusual with newspapers. What makes the Times unique””and what any Catholic bishop ought to understand””is that it is not just the nation’s self-appointed newspaper of record. It is, to paraphrase Chesterton, an institution with the soul of a church. And the church it most resembles in size, organization, internal culture, and international reach is the Roman Catholic Church.

Like the Church of Rome, the Times is a global organization. Even in these reduced economic times, the newspaper’s international network of news bureaus rivals the Vatican’s diplomatic corps. The difference is that Times bureau chiefs are better paid and, in most capitals, more influential. A report from a papal nuncio ends up in a Vatican dossier, but a report from a Times correspondent is published around the world, often with immediate repercussions. With the advent of the Internet, stories from the Times can become other outlets’ news in an ever-ramifying process of global cycling and recycling. That, of course, is exactly what happened with the Times piece on Fr. Murphy, the deceased Wisconsin child molester. The pope speaks twice a year urbi et orbi (to the city and to the world), but the Times does that every day.

Again like the Church of Rome, the Times exercises a powerful magisterium or teaching authority through its editorial board. There is no issue, local or global, on which these (usually anonymous) writers do not pronounce with a papal-like editorial “we.” Like the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the editorial board is there to defend received truth as well as advance the paper’s political, social, and cultural agendas. One can no more imagine a Times editorial opposing any form of abortion””to take just one of that magisterium’s articles of faith””than imagine a papal encyclical in favor.

The Times, of course, does not claim to speak infallibly in its judgments on current events. (Neither does the pope.) But to the truly orthodox believers in the Times, its editorials carry the burden of liberal holy writ. As the paper’s first and most acute public editor, Daniel Okrent, once put it, the editorial page is “so thoroughly saturated in liberal theology that when it occasionally strays from that point of view the shocked yelps from the left overwhelm even the ceaseless rumble of disapproval from the right.”

Read it all–another from the long list of post when I get a chance–KSH.

It started as a traffic ticket, issued to a woman at the wheel whose vision police said was dangerously obstructed by a full-face Islamic veil.

Before long, the case expanded into charges of polygamy and welfare fraud lodged against her common-law husband, a French national of Algerian origin. And now, according to Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux, it has become a reason to amend the constitution to harden the way French society deals with lawbreakers among a Muslim minority estimated at more than 5 million.

The noisy rise to national concern of a $25 traffic ticket issued to Sandrine Mouleres last April in the port city of Nantes, 220 miles west of Paris, has illuminated the extent of unease in France and other Western European countries over Muslim populations whose customs and visibility often clash with the continent’s secular and Christian values.

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My fear is that Bill Maher’s religious-like crusade to wipe out religion is going to wipe out the Bill Maher I’ve grown to enjoy and respect.

His seething intolerance and disrespect for people with religious faith are becoming as offensive as the racial and sexual-orientation bigotry Maher delights in railing against.

Last Friday on his HBO program, “Real Time with Bill Maher,” he engaged his political panel in a 14-minute discussion that focused on his belief that religious people are “deluded.” His panelists, including an author who is an atheist, disagreed with Maher, which served to frustrate him.

Maher’s flippant, dismissive and condescending attitude frustrated me, one of his biggest fans. I know the benefits of faith in a higher power. That Maher does not saddens me. But it does not make me think he’s delusional.

This ran a little while ago in the Kansas City Star but I missed it; our local paper ran it on the op-ed page yesterday. Read it all–KSH.

In my work as president of the National Secular Society I sometimes receive manuscripts from people who have come up with what they imagine is the definitive refutation of Christian claims. “Publish this,” they say, “and Christianity will end within a year!” (See here for an example.)

I find these turgid tomes no more convincing than the ones that they seek to refute. They are anti-theology, and given that theology is drivel, efforts to unpick it are hopeless.

What is theology? I think one of the best definitions was given by the sci-fi writer Robert A Heinlein when he said: “Theology … is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn’t there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.”

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When President O’Donnell asked me to give this address, I expressed one concern: “Will there be a protest? And will you prosecute the protestors? Or at least 88 of them?” He made no commitment. I accepted anyway.

So what can I tell you? This is a time of crises. The economy is a mess, the culture is a mess, the government is out of control. And, in the last three years, Notre Dame lost 21 football games. But this is a great time for us to be here, especially you graduates of this superbly Catholic college. This is so because the remedy for the general meltdown today is found only in Christ and in the teachings of the Catholic Church. Let’s talk bluntly about our situation and what you can do about it.

Read it all but please note: I would be grateful to readers if there could be no comments about the historical reference to Germany but instead to the larger argument–thank you; KSH.

Facing the “plurality of value systems and ethical outlooks” associated with secularism, Pope Benedict XVI today urged Portuguese Christians to embrace the “nucleus” of their faith. The pontiff also hinted they should expect blowback, calling Christians to be ready for “the radical choice of martyrdom.”

Benedict hailed the secular separation of church and state for “opening up a new area of freedom for the church,” but also warned that the ethical pluralism can sow confusion about “the human meaning of life” and also “marginalize” the public role of religious faith.

During comments aboard the papal plane, Benedict nonetheless stressed the importance of dialogue with secular culture.

“The presence of secularism is something normal, but a separation of cult from life, a separation of secularism from cult and faith, is anomalous and must be overcome,” Benedict said. “The great challenge is for the two to meet and to discover their true identity ”¦ this, as I said, is a mission for Europe and a human necessity in our time.”

All in all, Benedict’s pitch vis-à-vis secularism on the opening day of his four-day swing in Portugal seemed a version of the ancient Roman dictum, “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Benedict’s advice to believers making their way in a secular world was, “Seek dialogue, but be ready for martyrdom.”

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“I don’t believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don’t believe it myself. But there’s a big ‘but’ which enters in here. I am much more conscious than I ever was ”” for obvious reasons ”” on what it will mean to people left behind once I’m dead. It won’t mean anything for me. But it will mean a lot to them. It’s important to them ”” by which I mean my children or my wife or my very close friends ”” that some spirit of me is in a positive way present in their lives, in their heads, in their imaginations and so on. So [in] one curious way I’ve come to believe in the afterlife ”” as a place where I still have moral responsibilities, just as I do in this life ”” except that I can only exercise them before I get there. Once I get there, it will be too late. So, no God. No organized religion. But a developing sense that there’s something bigger than the world we live in, including after we die, and we have responsibilities in that world.”

—European historian Tony Judt in an interview with Terry Gross of NPR

At present quite a few sociologists specialized in the analysis of cultural tendencies and processes — for example John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of The Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, author of the bestseller “God Is Back” — are not convinced that atheistic secularism or religious indifference is advancing in society; rather, the opposite is happening.

Decades ago some predicted the death of religion, above all of Christianity, but later they have had to rectify themselves and admit a return of the religious under very varied forms.

Not a few say that we are in a post-secular period, characterized by a growing interest and debate on fundamental human questions, with a patent religious dimension.

In a recent report titled “The Return of God,” a non-confessional Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, was surprised by the boom of books on faith in Italian bookstores, where sales have increased by 27% in the past year.

Concretely, it stated that the sale of books on religious topics had increased by 196% in the large centers of distribution, such as supermarkets and commercial centers.

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Secularism is and has always been a concerted effort by a relatively small group of people to increase their power and enrich themselves by declaring the great majority of their neighbors to be dangerously intolerant and deluded. [Hunter] Baker’s suggested alternative to secularism is simple: pluralism. “In a pluralistic environment,” he writes, “we simply enter the public square and say who we are and what we believe.” Whereas secularists require “that individuals with religious reasons pretend to think and act on some other basis,” we should recognize that everybody has motives and none has a right to claim hegemony over the discussion: “The focus should be on the wisdom and justice of particular policies, not on the motives for the policies.”

That sounds wonderful, but it’s difficult to imagine why secularists would want to go along with it. Baker does not say, nor does he explain the book’s title. I’ll take a stab at it. Perhaps the “end” to which Baker refers is not a finish but instead a goal””as in a political end. Perhaps it does not matter if secularists refuse to accept a social contract of pluralism. Maybe clarifying that the end of secularism is the enrichment and empowerment of secularists will embolden the great majority of American society, the most religious economically advanced nation in the world, to insist that choices be made on the basis of “the wisdom and justice of particular policies” instead of who offers them and why.

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…the cardinal did not fail to point out that the modern relationship between secularism and Christianity serves a needed purpose for the purification and maturation of Christianity: “Christianity also needs the critical voice of secular Europe, asking hard questions, sometimes nasty questions, questions we should not try to escape or avoid.

“It does Christianity good to listen to the questions of secular society and be challenged to answer them. It wakes the Christians up and challenges them. It questions Christianity’s credibility. And Christianity needs to be questioned.

“It is good for us to be held accountable.”

He explained that the critical questioning of the secular world presses Christianity to become what it is called to be, and helps to purify what is incoherent between its words and deeds. “And why?” he asked. “Because deep down, the secular West longs for an authentic Christianity, and hopes for a Christianity that is credible through its life.”

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…Benedict’s outreach to Lefebvrites and dissident Anglicans forms part of a trend I’ve described as “evangelical Catholicism.” One cornerstone is to reassert markers of Catholic distinctiveness — such as Mass in Latin, and traditional moral teaching — as a means of ensuring that the church is not assimilated to secularism. At the policy-setting level of the church today, this defense of Catholic identity is job number one.

Historically, “evangelical Catholicism” is a creative impulse rather than something purely defensive, with roots in the papacy of Leo XIII in the late 19th century and his effort to bring a renewed Catholic tradition to bear on social and political life. Nevertheless, fear that secularism may erode the faith from within is also a powerful current propelling evangelical Catholicism forward.

To over-simplify a bit, Benedict XVI is opening the door to the Lefebvrites and to traditionalist Anglicans in part because whatever else they may be, they are among the Christians least prone to end up, in the memorable phrase of Jacques Maritain, “kneeling before the world,” meaning sold out to secularism.

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The “God slot” can count the Prince of Wales among its fans but, despite having supporters in the highest of places, the clamour has grown in recent months for it to change its policy of exclusivity ”“ or be dropped altogether.

And with a decision expected within the next few weeks, the behind-the-scenes battle between secularists and believers has intensified.

Senior Church of England bishops have privately lobbied the trust over the importance of maintaining the status quo. Meanwhile, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that secularists have warned the corporation it would be in breach of equality laws if it refuses to make the slot more inclusive. Lawyers have been asked by senior management at the BBC to investigate the claim so that they can advise the trust on whether they would be at risk of facing the fight going to court. This legal challenge is a new twist in a battle between secularists and believers – and neither side is prepared to lose.

Thought for the Day may be a mere three-minute slot, but it has become a totemic issue in the social struggle over the role of religion in public life.

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Nowhere, over the field of Christian doctrine, is the gulf between the biblical viewpoint and the outlook of modern secularism so yawning as in the matter of eschatology.

–J.A.T. Robinson, In The End, God (London: Collins, 2nd Edition, 1968), p. 15.

But …[Bishop Nazir-Ali] also said that the Church of England, which is used to working with society, should speak up more often to defend the country’s customs and institutions, most of which are based on Christian teaching.

“I think it will need to be more visible and take more of a stand on moral and spiritual issues,” the bishop said.

“What’s our basis for thinking that people are equal? It’s the Judeo-Christian tradition that has provided us with these resources and we will continue to need it.”

He said that the Church should defend the traditional two-parent family and Christian festivals, which are opposed not by followers of other faiths but by atheists who want to remove religion from the public square.

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When Kenneth Kistner, 85, died in February, his wife, Carmen, didn’t call any clergy.

At the Detroit memorial service for the Marine veteran and retired educator, Kistner’s family read a eulogy ”” one that Kistner himself approved years earlier, when it was drafted by a secular “celebrant” near their retirement home in Largo, Fla.

A growing number of people want to celebrate a loved one’s life at a funeral or memorial service without clergy ”” sometimes even without God.

And that’s giving rise to the new specialty of pastoral-style secular celebrants who deliver unique personalized eulogies without the rituals of institutional religion.

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Some secularists seem to like one-way streets. Their distaste for Christianity leads them to seek to drive it not only from the public square but even from any provision of education, health care, and welfare services. Ironically, intolerance of Christianity and Christian culture is proclaimed most often in the name of tolerance: Christianity must not be tolerated because of the need for greater tolerance.

At present, the most preferred means for addressing perceived intolerance seems to be antidiscrimination legislation. Across the Anglosphere and in many Western nations, the idea of antidiscrimination has shown enormous power to shape public opinion. It is being used to redefine marriage and to make a range of relationships acceptable as the foundation for new forms of the family. Antidiscrimination legislation, in tandem with new reproductive technologies, has made it possible for children to have three, four, or five parents, relegating the idea of a child being brought up by his natural mother and father to nothing more than a majority adult preference. The rights of children to be created in love and to be known and reared by their biological parents receives scant consideration when the legislative agenda is directed to satisfying adult needs and ambitions.

Until relatively recently, antidiscrimination laws usually included exemptions for churches and other religious groups so that they could practice and manifest their beliefs in freedom. That word exemptions is actually a misnomer, suggesting as it does some sort of concession from the state to eccentric minorities. These provisions are better described as protections of religious freedom””and such protections are increasingly being refused or defined in the narrowest possible terms in new antidiscrimination measures, with existing protections eroded or construed away by the courts.

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From here:

The modern period has never been especially devoted to reason as such; the notion that it ever was is merely one of its ‘originary’ myths. The true essence of modernity is a particular conception of what it is to be free, as I have said [in chap. 2]; and the Enlightenment language of an ‘age of reason’ was always really just a way of placing a frame around that idea of freedom, so as to portray it as the rational autonomy and moral independence that lay beyond the intellectual infancy of ‘irrational’ belief. But we are anything but rationalists now, so we no longer need cling to the pretense that reason was ever our paramount concern; we are today more likely to be committed to ‘my truth’ than to any notion of truth in general, no matter where that might lead. The myth of ‘enlightenment’ served well to liberate us from any antique notions of divine or natural law that might place unwelcome constraints upon our wills; but it has discharged its part and lingers on now only as a kind of habit of rhetoric. And now that the rationalist moment has largely passed, the modern faith in human liberation has become, if anything, more robust and more militant. Freedom for us today is something transcendent even of reason, and we no longer really feel that we must justify our liberties by recourse to some prior standard of responsible rationality. Freedom–conceived as the perfect, unconstrained spontaneity of individual will–is its own justification, its own highest standard, its own unquestionable truth. It is true, admittedly, that the modern understanding of freedom was for a time still bound to some concept of nature: many Enlightenment and Romantic narratives of human liberation concerned the rescue of an aboriginal human essence from the laws, creeds, customs, and institutions that suppressed it. Ultimately, though, even the idea of an invariable human nature came to seem something arbitrary and extrinsic, an intolerable limitation imposed upon a still more original, inward, pure, and indeterminate freedom of the will. We no longer seek so much to liberate human nature from the bondage of social convention as to liberate the individual from all conventions, especially those regarding what is natural.”

–David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: the Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies (New Haven, Connecticut:Yale University Press, 2009), 104-105. [Hat Tip: SPIW]

For all their manifold disagreements, Christians and Muslims are both “people of the Book”, and have an obligation to get those holy books into the hands of as many people as they can. Spreading the Word is hard. The Bible is 800,000 words long and littered with tedious passages about “begatting.” Many have claimed that the Koran, though only around a tenth of the length of the Bible, is an even more difficult read. Edward Gibbon complained about its “endless incoherent rhapsody of fable and precept”. Scholars who spend their lives studying them still argue over their ambiguities, literary allusions and obscure references.

Yet there are more Bibles and Korans available in more languages than at any time in history. More than 100 million copies of the Bible are sold or given away every year. The Koran is ubiquitous in the Muslim world. Whole chapters of the book are used to decorate mosques. The faithful transcribe phrases and put them around their necks in amulets, use them on bumper stickers or as letterheads.

This mountain of holy books is a giant refutation of the secularisation thesis.

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There is now a more detailed schedule available via this parish newsletter on page 2.

There is, in progressive circles, a certain fascination with those apocalyptic prophecies that seem to hold so many religious conservatives in thrall. From the sensation over the megaselling Left Behind book series to more recent media flare-ups around figures such as John Hagee (the television pastor of countdown-to-Armageddon fame), the end times seem to be looming at all times.

Turn your attention to a strain of thought ascendant in secular, environmentalist America and you might be surprised to find a similar apocalypse fixation, minus the Book of Revelation and anti-Christ parts. Call it the secular theology of environmental collapse ”” the fearful conviction that the hopelessly corrupt world as we know it has entered its death throes, with massive destruction stalking ever nearer.

Given the huge challenges facing this country and the constant barrage of “be afraid!” messages from politics and pulpits, it’s understandable that many of us have a close relationship with dread.

Yet we should remain wary of doomsday fantasizing, in either its religious or secular form.

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Ads proclaiming, “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake,” will appear on Washington, D.C., buses starting next week and running through December, sponsored by The American Humanist Association.

In lifting lyrics from “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” the Washington-based group is wading into what has become a perennial debate over commercialism, religion in the public square and the meaning of Christmas.

“We are trying to reach our audience, and sometimes in order to reach an audience, everybody has to hear you,” Fred Edwords, spokesman for the humanist group, said Tuesday. “Our reason for doing it during the holidays is there are an awful lot of agnostics, atheists and other types of non-theists who feel a little alone during the holidays because of its association with traditional religion.”

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As the presidential campaign winds down, members of America’s largest and most silent minority may be excused for feeling a little left out. As Republicans and Democrats escalate their appeals to 2008’s most contested and prized constituency ”” swing voters among evangelicals and Catholics ”” they treat those who are not religious as if they are invisible….

But something is wrong with this picture. It erases vast numbers of Americans ””not only atheists, agnostics and secularists, but also those who have turned away from the God and religion of the Old and New Testaments. And it makes it seem as though most of those who claim to be “believers” believe pretty much the same things ”” though this is manifestly false. It encourages the sense that there are two kinds of Americans, the overwhelming majority who believe and belong, and those few do not believe, and are outsiders. But the conventional wisdom that nearly all Americans believe in God is wrong.

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In the cloud of dust that passes for public rhetoric these days, few epithets can stir up passions as quickly as accusing an opponent of being a “secularist,” or some variant of the term. To middle-of-the- road folks, to embrace secularization is to be vaguely un-American, or at best irreverent. For religious conservatives, of course, it is the red flag that can send them stam peding to the ballot box, and thus it has become a favorite flourish for campaigners.

A prime example was Mitt Romney’s highly touted speech on religion in December, in which the Republican candidate sought to allay suspicions about his own Mormonism by projecting himself as a defender of faith — any faith at all, as long as it was not what he derided as “the religion of secularism.”

Romney’s blast was loud, but hardly unusual. In a commence ment address at Liberty University last May, Newt Gingrich eulogized the university’s founder, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, by lamenting “a growing culture of radical secularism” that Falwell battled to the end. “In hostility to American history,” Gingrich said, “the radical secularist insists that religious be lief is inherently divisive and that public debate can only proceed on secular terms when religious belief is excluded.”

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