There is a lopsided divide in America about what it means to be a religious person, with a majority believing that it’s about acting morally but a strong minority equating it with faith.

Nearly six out of 10 Americans (59 percent) say that being a religious person “is primarily about living a good life and doing the right thing,” as opposed to the more than one-third (36 percent) who hold that being religious “is primarily about having faith and the right beliefs.”

The findings, released Thursday (July 18), are part of a report by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution that aims to paint a more nuanced picture of the American religious landscape, and the religious left in particular.

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Employed Americans of all ages with college degrees are less likely to be engaged at work than are their respective peers with a high school education or less, so their engagement is not related to being a recent graduate.

College-educated American workers’ lower engagement mainly stems from being less likely to strongly agree with the statement “at work I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.” Americans with some college education or a college degree were also less likely to use their strengths at work.

The engagement findings by education level are based on Americans’ assessments of workplace elements with proven linkages to performance outcomes, including productivity, customer service, quality, retention, safety, and profit.

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The greatest cultural””and ecclesial””challenge we have to confront is the loss of a palpable sense that God’s life makes all the difference in the world to our social and political decisions. Many things have made this witness more and more difficult in our era, and they touch the wider world as much as they do local American concerns. That witness ought to be First Things’ focus.

I am not as certain as R. R. Reno is, for instance, that theological liberalism has lost “decisively.” To be sure, what was once called “liberal Protestantism” as a set of vital institutions has been withering rapidly, and with it some of the most common tropes these institutions generated.

But many of the corrosive aspects of liberal Protestantism””its ways of conceptualizing God as a benign projection of our human hopes, for example, and of approaching Scripture as a malleable human or cultural construct””have been adopted not only by mainstream secular culture but by “conservatives” and “Evangelicals” across the board, as the rapid shift in American attitudes regarding sexuality demonstrates.

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I had hoped that the ghastly invention of so-called ”˜Indaba’ might have disappeared from the counsels of the Church with the retirement of Rowan Williams…
………..
…the small groups operating at General Synod on Saturday at least had a purpose ”“ to decide legislation on women bishops which can carry assent through the General Synod process. But it’s difficult to see what these kinds of structured exercises in reconciliation actually achieve when the final decision-making is still enacted through an adversarial process of stand-ing orders, voting and politicking.

In fact, only 48 hours after these small groups a series of amendments intended to improve provision for traditionalist consciences were being voted down one by one. Speaker after speaker stood up to assure their opponents that they wanted them to be a full part of the Church while at the same time defeating every measure that might have given them some space for flourishing.

These sorts of small group-driven conversations, Indaba and attempts at reconciliation provide the illusion that a real conversation has taken place and people have listened to each other. In reality, they merely substitute process for truth-telling.

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Following yesterday’s launch of the Government’s Trident Alternatives Review the Bishop of Wakefield, the Rt Revd Stephen Platten, lead bishop on defence and security issues, issued the following statement:

“The Government should be congratulated for undertaking such a far reaching and thorough review of the alternatives available to Trident and for making its analysis available to the wider public for the first time. Such transparency is vital if we are to have a more informed public debate about what our nuclear weapons are for and how they should be deployed.

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People around the globe believe that China will inevitably replace the United States as the world’s leading superpower, but that doesn’t mean they like the prospect, according to a new study on global attitudes.

The survey that the Pew Research Center conducted in 39 countries confirms much of the conventional wisdom in Washington about the shifting balance of power between the United States and China.

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With a stated aim to “provoke,” Britain’s best-known TV company, Channel 4, is justifying its live daily broadcast of the “adhan” ”” the early hour Muslim call to prayer ”” and sparking applause as well as anger.

The broadcasts, airing each morning at 3 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time, will continue throughout the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

“We are focusing on the positive aspects of Islam and hoping to explain to a broader public what Ramadan is, and what it means for the 2.8 million Muslims who take part in the UK and provide a platform for different views and different voices,” said Ralph Lee, the network’s head of programming.

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Ask her why she hasn’t had a relationship at Penn, and she won’t complain about the death of courtship or men who won’t commit. Instead, she’ll talk about “cost-benefit” analyses and the “low risk and low investment costs” of hooking up.

“I positioned myself in college in such a way that I can’t have a meaningful romantic relationship, because I’m always busy and the people that I am interested in are always busy, too,” she said.

“And I know everyone says, ”˜Make time, make time,’ ” said the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity but agreed to be identified by her middle initial, which is A. “But there are so many other things going on in my life that I find so important that I just, like, can’t make time, and I don’t want to make time.”

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

The world is changing but large numbers of unaccountably powerful people still seem to believe it should be run like a fantasy version of 1950s bourgeois suburbia, all picket fences and patriarchy. The tax allowance being proposed will not benefit every married couple ”“ it is specifically designed to reward and give an incentive to those in which one partner either does no work outside the home or earns very little.

The policy is, in effect, a subsidy for stay-at-home mums. Mothers who have the gall to be unmarried, by contrast, have just had their state support cut still further in the latest Spending Review because this government is more interested in making moral statements than in keeping children out of poverty.

Read it all from the New Statesman.

O God, who hast given us minds to know thee, hearts to love thee, and voices to show forth thy praise: Help us to worship thee with understanding, with reverence, and with joy; for the glory of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

“The steps of a good man are ordered of the Lord,” reads Psalm 37:23. On the margin of his Bible at this verse George Mueller had a notation, “And the stops…”

Trust in the Lord, and do good;
so you will dwell in the land, and enjoy security.
Take delight in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the Lord;
trust in him, and he will act.

–Psalm 37:3-5

“The evangelical recession is kind of a parallel to the financial recession,” Dickerson said. “When we look at a lot of the critical health indicators of evangelical Christianity as a historic movement, what we see is a lot of similar trends.”

While discussing reasons behind the perceived decline of influence from evangelical Christianity, Dickerson pointed attention to the rise of nonbelievers in America.

“We’re not converting unbelievers at the rate that we used to be,” he said. “We’re losing a lot of our young people. Funds are declining.”

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In Tolkien, the City was seen as either a a necessary evil (Minas Tirith) or as the embodiment of the diabolical (“lovely Lugbürz”). Even though the first glance of Peter Jackson’s Edoras provoked the comment from my son ”“ ”˜he’s king of that?’ ”“ there is never any doubt where Tolkien’s sympathies lay. The Companions of the Ring, even the restored King himself, spend as little narrative time in Minas Tirith as possible.

In contrast, Williams both saw and expanded upon one of the central visions of the Scriptures; we began our career in a Garden, but we are not to return to it. Whether or not the cherub with the double-edged sword will still be keeping guard or not, it will be unnecessary. The Tree of Life has been uprooted and replanted in a City, which City is our final destiny. It is not for nothing that the City gives the name to that most desirable state of man; civilization, apart from which there is only savagery and barbarism. For Williams, the Image of the City was the Image of what he calls the vicarious life. Christians are always being exhorted to “live for others”. Williams says that the City makes it known that we not only live for others, but because of others. Others have labored and you have entered upon their labors. You only have to spend a day in a major city where there is a sanitary strike to understand just how little of an abstraction this is. Cities are the places par excellence, where human energies are collected, weighed and measured, and submitted to the process of Exchange. For Exchange, to Williams, is not primarily a Christian doctrine explaining how the virtues of Christ are applied to the accounts of sinful men. Exchange is, because of Christ’s sacrifice, the very Life of the Universe.

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Is “secularization” little more than a self-congratulatory tale that modern-day atheists like to tell, or do we live in a secular age after all?

Eberstadt thinks it’s the latter, and in this she surely is correct. In his book A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor makes the point well with a question: “Why is it so hard to believe in God (in many milieux) in the modern West, while in 1500 it was virtually impossible not to?” Eberstadt wisely points to the work of historian Eamon Duffy, whose book The Stripping of the Altars shows in great detail how medieval Englishmen, even if they weren’t always to be found in church on Sundays, lived in a world in which Christianity defined their everyday lives and filled their imaginative horizons. We just don’t live in that world anymore””for us, it’s entirely possible to go to school, find a mate, engage in politics, take part in cultural life, and listen to popular music, all without having to confront God in anything but a peripheral way.

So, Eberstadt has good reason to say that the West has “lost God” in some way. But she’s not careful enough in spelling out what that means””for, as she herself makes clear, the secularization of the European social imagination that historians like Duffy detail is perfectly compatible with a rise in church attendance. In fact, that’s basically what happened, until church attendance started to drop off in the 20th century. Explaining what happened requires telling a story that can account for this complexity, and that’s where Eberstadt falls short.

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The Right Reverend Alan Hopes, 69, was welcomed at the West Door of the Catholic cathedral in Norwich before the two-hour Mass of Installation.

Bishop Alan will lead Roman Catholics in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.

He succeeds the Right Reverend Michael Evans, who died of cancer in 2011.

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In many ways, the war in Afghanistan is one of ideas, of narrative, of whose story is credible, says U.S. Army Major Dawud Agbere.

If that’s true, Agbere could be the most dangerous U.S. soldier that the Taliban face.

And he doesn’t even carry a gun.

Agbere, 45, is the only active-duty Muslim U.S. Army chaplain in Afghanistan and one of just four in the Army.

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Writer and scholar Reza Aslan was 15 years old when he found Jesus. His secular Muslim family had fled to the U.S. from Iran, and Aslan’s conversion was, in a sense, an adolescent’s attempt to fit into American life and culture. “My parents were certainly surprised,” Aslan tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.

As Aslan got older, he began his studies in the history of Christianity, and he started to lose faith. He came to the realization that Jesus of Nazareth was quite different from the Messiah he’d been introduced to at church. “I became very angry,” he says. “I became resentful. I turned away from Christianity. I began to really reject the concept of Christ.”

But Aslan continued his Christian scholarship, and he found that he was increasingly interested in Jesus as a historical figure. The result is his new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth ”” a historical look at Jesus in the context of his time and Jewish religion, and against the backdrop of the Roman Empire.

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Hospitals will today be told to review the treatment of every patient who has been on the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway after an independent review found examples of abuse across the NHS.
The Department of Health will tell hospitals to refer doctors to the General Medical Council if they find the procedures have been abused.

The pathway is used to “manage” the death of terminally ill NHS patients. However, the Neuberger inquiry, which will be published today, has heard allegations that patients have been unnecessarily sedated and denied food and water.

The inquiry is expected to say that there were “numerous examples of poor implementation and worrying standards in care” and that in some cases patients have been put on the pathway without their families being informed.

Read it all and there is a CNS story here also.

The ecumenical movement of the past 100 years has been wildly successful in eliminating old tensions and rivalries, but such pervasive success been can foster complacency, even in a time when a skeptical world needs to see more signs of God-given unity in action.

That combination of joy and concern is a central motivator for the Rev. Callan Slipper, a Church of England priest and author of Five Steps to Living Christian Unity, due in September from New City Press.

“We are currently the victims of our past success,” Slipper tells TLC. “The new vision I would advocate is one where we see one another as truly belonging to one another.”

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The BC Coroners Service has confirmed the cause of death for Cory Monteith.

Post-mortem testing, which included an autopsy and toxicological analysis, found that Mr. Monteith, aged 31, died of a mixed drug toxicity, involving heroin and alcohol…..

It should be noted that at this point there is no evidence to suggest Mr. Monteith’s death was anything other than a most-tragic accident. When the investigation is concluded, a Coroners Report will be issued.

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It was less than two weeks ago that General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, chief of the Egyptian armed forces, announced the removal of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, in the wake of the largest mass protests the country had ever seen. On July 3, an alliance of liberals, leftists, Nasserists, revolutionary youth, Coptic Christians and Salafists appeared together on television for a harmonious group picture.

But the rare pact was fragile. When soldiers opened fire on protesting Morsi supporters last Monday and at least 51 people died, the Salafists of the Al-Nour Party, or Party of the Light, demonstratively revoked their cooperation with the transitional government — albeit only temporarily.

In fact, the Salafists need to maintain cooperation with the military and the transitional government in order to remain influential. Under Morsi’s presidency, they had the same problems as the secular opposition. They were marginalized, and important positions went to members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Now Bassam Sarka, the deputy party leader, has renewed his support for the state, saying that Al-Nour will “demonstrate responsibility” and “cooperate with the military to prevent worse things from happening.” The reward came quickly, when the military leaders decided to keep a controversial article in the constitution, whereby the principles of Sharia law are the “primary source of legislation” — despite the fact that the liberals had just rejected the very same article.

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New protesters arrive every couple of minutes at the unmarked gates of the Ministry of Health in Beijing, coming in the faint hope that the national authorities will be able to help where their local hospitals and clinics have failed.

One young mother carries a tattered notebook full of medical records, baby ultrasounds and official letters. She says she is trying to get treatment for her son, now aged eight, who has organ damage after drinking toxic infant formula as a baby. Another young woman unfurls graphic pictures of her injuries after a violent beating by police, and says she is here to protest against a local hospital that refused to treat her.

Extreme underfunding and overcrowding mark the Chinese medical system. Its dysfunctions also spawn rampant abuses and corruption that can make it a treacherous place for drug companies. As pressures rise on the Chinese government to act over poor healthcare quality and rising healthcare costs, officials have embarked on round after round of crackdowns and investigations into hospitals, doctors and drug companies.

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Take a look.

“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”

The words of Oscar Wilde are no less true today than when he spoke them. The books we choose to read shape who we are and how we see the world. Because of this, I consume books voraciously. Mostly religious non-fiction, but also some fiction as well. I was recently thinking about which religious books I’ve read during the last decade shaped and impacted me most, and I decided to share them with you….

Think of your own list and then read it all and see how they compare and contrast–KSH.

O Lord, who in a time of turmoil and confusion didst raise up thy servant William White, and didst endow him with wisdom, patience, and a reconciling temper, that he might lead thy Church into ways of stability and peace: Hear our prayer, we beseech thee, and give us wise and faithful leaders, that through their ministry thy people may be blessed and thy will be done; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

O Lord, heavenly Father, in whom is the fullness of light and wisdom: Enlighten our minds by thy Holy Spirit, and give us grace to receive thy Word with reverence and humility, without which no man can understand thy truth; for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.

–John Calvin (1509-1564)

On an appointed day Herod put on his royal robes, took his seat upon the throne, and made an oration to them. And the people shouted, “The voice of a god, and not of man!” Immediately an angel of the Lord smote him, because he did not give God the glory; and he was eaten by worms and died.

–Acts 12:21-23

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The inference to be drawn from [Bill ] Lawton’s argument is that an emphasis on discontinuous and futurist eschatology has had an impact on the way in which Anglicans from Sydney have responded to the rising tide of secularism since the 1960s. What I would like to show is that, while Sydney’s Anglicans have not always responded well to the challenges of the new secularism, they were not in fact given to the kind of world-abandonment supposedly characteristic of them in the late nineteenth century.

The period of secularization following the 1960s does indeed have some strong echoes of the late nineteenth century. In between these two eras was the high-water mark of church influence in Australian life, and in Sydney especially. In the midst of the Great Depression, Sydney Anglicans like the extraordinary R.B.S. Hammond (1870-1946) at St Barnabas’ Broadway distinguished themselves in remarkable service of the poor. The 1950s in particular was a time in which Australian society seemed more congenial to the influence of the church than it had been previously.

This was demonstrated by the dramatic impact of the Billy Graham crusade of 1959 – an event which had all the appearance of the dawn of a new glorious age of Christian social influence through the work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of the thousands of people who went forward in Sydney and Melbourne. More than 130,000 people made a commitment to Christ, a figure which represents nearly 2% of the Australian population at the time.

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