Real Live Preacher

This is a blog I had forgotten about until I saw it linked on another blog.  This pair of stories reminded me why I loved it.

http://blogs.salon.com/0001772/stories/2003/03/04/theAdventOfElliot.html

http://blogs.salon.com/0001772/stories/2003/03/11/thePassionOfElliot.html

 

Family makes Pilgramage to DC

A wonderful story about a family from Texas making a pilgramage to see the Pope in DC. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/us/nationalspecial2/16pilgrim.html?hp

I especially liked the end of the story when they get lost in Nortern Virginia and they call the only person they know in the area and he offers them his house on the spot.  Just a wonderful example of Christian living.

 

Pope Blog on NY Times

There’s going to a lot of coverage of all things Catholic in the week because of the Papal visit.  Check out this group blog put together by the New York Times.

http://thepope.blogs.nytimes.com/

 

In Our Time

BBC Radio has an interesting programme called In Our Time.  It discusses the history of ideas related to science, religion, philosophy, history and culture.  It usually has very interesting topics and knowledgeable guests.

This week’s topic is the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII.  You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes or follow the link and listen to the lastest episode.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml

Enjoy

 

New Beginnings

Christianity is a religion of new beginnings.  Jesus died for our sins, so that we may have new life.  A life that is not tainted by our past.  It’s not that our past doesn’t matter.  Our past must be confronted and dealt with but Catholics are given that all important sacrament of reconciliation.  As long as we deal forthrightly with our past we are not doomed by it.  Our life can have a new beginning.  Our future is not determined by our past.  He did not ask the fisherman if they were righteous, he asked them to drop their nets and follow him.  That is all Jesus ever asks of us, to follow him.

 

Please Check the Condition of Your Whips

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/03/19/easter.whipping/index.html

Health officials in the Philippines are asking — no, “strongly advising” — Catholics taking part in Easter self-flagellation rituals this week to first check the condition of their whips before lashing their backs.

Authorities worry that dirty whips could lead to tetanus and other infections, according to a report in the Manila Times newspaper Wednesday.

“We are not trying to go against the Lenten tradition here,” Health Secretary Francisco Duque III told the newspaper. “But this advice is important to make sure that no one will land in the hospital due to tetanus or other infections that penitents might get in the process.”

So be sure to check the condition of your whips. You don’t want to give yourselves tetanus or some other infection during holy week.

 

Pew Forum on Religion Part 2

This is the second post on the Pew Forum’s Survey of the American Religious Landscape.  I said I was going to comment on the lack of converts and I eventually will, but this post is going to be about a sampling bias Pew found in their data.

On page 41 of the study Pew noticed that their Latino percentages did not match those found in a study they conducted a year earlier.  They had used different questions which may have introduced some bias but they believed and found by conducting an additional survey that the source of the bias was the lack of immediately bilingual questioners.  The Landscape Survey attempted to conduct interviews in English, if they could not complete the survey the household was contacted again by a Spanish interviewer.  In the fully bilingual surveys the Catholic chunk of the Latino population was 65 and 68%.  In the Landscape Survey it was 58%.  Incoporating those numbers into the total population would boost the Catholic percentage from 23.9 to 25.1%.  This falls in the line with other surveys of the American population that has found Catholic membership holding steady at 25% for the past two decades.

There are some interesting numbers that can be drawn from this error.  Pew stated that Latino respondants who completed the full English survey identified themselves as Catholic only 48% of the time.  According to a Pew Hispanic Survey from 2006 59% of Latino’s can speak English.  By doing some math with these numbers I found that of Spanish-speaking Latino’s 89-98% identified as Catholic.  Now I am willing to acknowledge that I using numbers from multiple surveys and that introduces many problems but as a general statement it can be seen that as Latino’s assimilate they are rapidly losing their Catholic character.

According to the 2006 survey 23% of first generation immigrants spoke English, 88% of second generation, and 94% of third generation.  So with a few caveats we can speak of the Spanish speaking cohort as mainly first generation immigrants and the English speaking cohort as later generations.  What this allows us to see is the disintegration of the ability to pass Catholicism onto the new generations once they have reached America.  Catholics are losing 46-51% of later generation Latinos.

 

Pew Forum on Religion Part 1

This will be the first of a couple posts on the Pew Survey. 

The Pew Forum has completed a vast survey of the American Religious Landscape.  They released their first report last week, you might have seen some of the headlines.  “Ex-Catholics third largest religious group in America”, “Protestants are barely the majority.”  Many of these statements are misleading.  Here’s a table of the data for the major religious groups in America.

	Childhood	Present	Entering	Leaving
Catholic	31.4	23.9	2.6	10.1
Baptist	20.9	17.2	4.5	8.3
Methodist	8.3	6.2	2.4	4.4
Nothing	6.6	12.1	9.6	4.1
Lutheran	5.5	4.6	1.4	2.3
Pentecostal	3.9	4.4	2.6	2
Presbyterian	3.4	2.7	1.3	2
Protestant non spec	3.4	4.9	3.6	2.1
Restorationist	2.3	2.1	1	1.2
Jewish	1.9	1.7	0.3	0.5
Mormon	1.8	1.7	0.4	0.5
Anglican	1.8	1.5	0.7	1
Non Denom	1.5	4.5	3.9	0.8
Congregationalist	0.8	0.8	0.4	0.5
Holiness	0.8	1.2	0.7	0.5
Atheist	0.5	1.6	1.4	0.3
Adventist	0.4	0.5	0.3	0.2
Buddhist	0.4	0.7	0.5	0.2

Most of the new reports focused on the raw numbers.  Catholics lost a lot of members.  Protestants are in net decline, almost entirely attributable to the mainline churches losses.  A better way to look at the numbers is to compare by percent lost and gained.  When you do that you see some interesting things.

While 10% of the American population is ex-Catholics, Catholics retain members (32%) better than all but two religious traditions.  Only Jews and Mormons retain members better (at 26% and 28% respectively).  Baptists are the next religious group at 40% and Lutherans lose 42%.  No other major religious group loses less than 50% of their members.  So in fact, although our youth catechesis programs were atrocious in the 70’s and 80’s they were not the primary cause of our net loss.

You could look at the number of people entering the Catholic faith and say that the number of Catholic converts easily outnumbers the entire Anglican/Episcopalian church.  But that would be to miss the point again.  In looking at the converts as a percentage of each church the Catholic church has been abysmal.  Catholic converts make up 11% of the members in the church.  To give you some perspective Jewish converts make up 18% of their church (that’s a religion that doesn’t seek to evangelize).  The next two groups were Mormons at 24% and Baptists at 26%.  Every other religion/denomination was over 30%.

What is clear from these numbers is that we live in a religious marketplace, this is especially true of Protestants.  Most Protestant denominations lose half of their members from childhood to adulthood but gain back most of the that number in adult conversions.  Mormons, Jews, and Catholics still have some stickiness to their religions but also have trouble bringing new members in.  For Jews this makes sense because of the ethnic nature of their religion and the fact that they do not proselytize.  For Mormons and Catholics this is surprising and troubling.  Especially for Catholics since our convert rate is so poor.  In my next post I will talk about why this may be happening and what we could do.

 

Miracles in New Mexico

A neat article from the NY Times about a church in New Mexico that is known as the “Lourdes of America.” It’s oddly titled as “A Pastor Begs to Differ With Flock on Miracles” and starts out

“It’s not the dirt that makes the miracles!” the Rev. Casimiro Roca said with exasperation.

From this you might assume that the miracle story is bogus but

Father Roca believes in miracles, too, but, he said, “They are the work of the Good Lord.”

“I always tell people that I have no faith in the dirt, I have faith in the Lord,” he said. “But people can believe what they want.”

I love to find stories like this.  We think of this country as an overwhelmingly Protestant country and sometimes mistakenly think that there are not holy places to visit just around the corner.  I wish I would have known about this church I would have loved to stopped when I made my cross country road trip eight years ago.

If you know of any other holy places around the country please share them with me.

 

Everything You Know About Heaven May Be Wrong

From an interview of N.T. Wright in Time Magazine

N.T. “Tom” Wright is one of the most formidable figures in the world of Christian thought. As Bishop of Durham, he is the fourth most senior cleric in the Church of England and a major player in the strife-riven global Anglican Communion; as a much-read theologian and Biblical scholar he has taught at Cambridge and is a hero to conservative Christians worldwide for his 2003 book The Resurrection of the Son of God, which argued forcefully for a literal interpretation of that event.

I have to interject that The Resurrection of the Son of God is indeed a very good book from a conservative theological point of view. The article continues.

In his new book, Surprised by Hope (HarperOne), Wright quotes a children’s book by California first lady Maria Shriver called What’s Heaven, which describes it as “a beautiful place where you can sit on soft clouds and talk… If you’re good throughout your life, then you get to go [there]… When your life is finished here on earth, God sends angels down to take you heaven to be with him.” That, says Wright is a good example of “what not to say.” The Biblical truth, he continues, “is very, very different.”

In the Bible we are told that you die, and enter an intermediate state. St. Paul is very clear that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead already, but that nobody else has yet. Secondly, our physical state. The New Testament says that when Christ does return, the dead will experience a whole new life: not just our soul, but our bodies. And finally, the location. At no point do the resurrection narratives in the four Gospels say, “Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven.” It says that Christ is coming here, to join together the heavens and the Earth in an act of new creation.

Go click on the time.com link and read the whole article. There’s much more there than I quoted. But, I have to say that nothing in the above paragraph strikes me as contradictory to anything in the bible.

So I want to ask a few questions. Do you think N.T. Wright is right? If he is right, how does that affect your faith? How does the idea that heaven will involve more work sound to you, rather than laying on clouds plucking at harps?