You want church growth? You want to reach the unchurched? Stop the preoccupation with middle class suburbanites and young urban professionals. The fields that are in the greatest need of harvest are the less educated, the lower income, and the blue collar. THAT’S the group that has stopped going to church: If you don’t have a college degree, you’re less likely to be up early on Sunday morning, singing church hymns. That’s the upshot of a new study that finds the… Read more
How did the animals know?
August 26, 2011 By Gene Veith 72 Comments
Shortly before the earthquake hit Washington, D.C., the animals in the National Zoo started freaking out. So did lots of people’s housepets, with sleepy cats suddenly jumping up and heading for the hills just prior to the quake. Scientists can’t figure out how they knew: Orangutans, gorillas, flamingos and red-ruffed lemurs acted strangely before humans detected the historic magnitude-5.8 earthquake. Now the question hovering over the zoo is: What did the animals know, and when did they know it? Therein… Read more
Tax breaks as ‘Tax expenditures’
August 26, 2011 By Gene Veith 52 Comments
A major proposal to address the deficit is to eliminate various tax deductions–such as for home mortgages and charitable (such as church) giving. Those tax breaks are being interpreted as the same as government spending. Eliminating them would increase government revenue by billions of dollars, or even, according to some estimates, a trillion. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post “Fact Checker,” takes a look at these claims and finds that things are not so simple. Actually, he shows, cutting out the… Read more
Glenn Beck and his allies in Israel
August 25, 2011 By Gene Veith 142 Comments
Glenn Beck is in Israel, holding a big rally supporting that country against its Islamic enemies and calling for solidarity with the Jewish people. What’s interesting, as Sarah Pulliam Bailey shows, is the way certain media outlets are confounding Beck, a Mormon, with “Christian fundamentalists” and “evangelicals” who believe that Israel is playing a role in Christ’s second coming. See Israel a la Glenn Beck » GetReligion. On the other hand, some ostensibly conservative Christians are indeed embracing Beck and… Read more
I believe in the “holy Catholic church” or “holy Christian church”?
August 25, 2011 By Gene Veith 164 Comments
The great Lutheran blogger Anthony Sacramone–remember Luther at the Movies?–goes from posting whole handfuls of entries a day at Strange Herring to going months without posting a thing (and now to keeping the public from reading it, for some reason). But he sometimes puts something up at the First Things site. He has a characteristically humorous, provocative, and instructive post there now: What’s in a Name? Plenty. » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog. After riffing on how… Read more
Philosophical counselors
August 25, 2011 By Gene Veith 20 Comments
Psychiatrists medicalize personal problems, while psychologists apply the social sciences. Now there are counselors who use philosophers to help people think through their problems: Patricia Anne Murphy is a philosopher with a real-world mission. Murphy may have a PhD and an intimate knowledge of Aristotle and Descartes, but in her snug Takoma Park bungalow, she’s helping a broken-hearted patient struggle through a divorce. Instead of offering the wounded wife a prescription for Effexor — which she’s not licensed to do… Read more
I felt the earth. move. under my feet
August 24, 2011 By Gene Veith 44 Comments
I was writing in my office at school when, around 1:51 yesterday, the building and my desk with the built in bookshelf started shaking. Hard. Back and forth for thirty seconds. My mind went just blank, and when I gathered my wits, right at the time it was over, I realized, Earthquake! I have never experienced one of those and have always been kind of paranoid about it, mildly worried whenever I set foot in California. I had heard from… Read more
Photo of Earthquake Devastation in D.C.
August 24, 2011 By Gene Veith 22 Comments
From Bright Young Things Via FamousDC.com HT: Necessary Roughness Read more
The Dominionist scare
August 24, 2011 By Gene Veith 99 Comments
Secularists are scaring themselves with a new bogeyman: Dominionists. That is their term for evangelicals and other conservative Christians, whom they are conflating with a tiny number of actual theocrats, which are probably fewer in number than members of the American Communist Party. I like Michael Gerson’s account: Evangelicals, warned liberal theologian Albert Outler, “want a society ruled by those who know what the word of God is. The technical name for that is ‘theocracy,’ and their Napoleon, whether he… Read more
Libertarian micro-nations
August 24, 2011 By Gene Veith 52 Comments
Some libertarian venture-capitalists are planning to build new nations on ocean platforms–they are calling it “seasteading” (get it–from homesteading?)–as libertarian mini-utopias: [Patri] Friedman [grandson of free market economist Milton Friedman] wants to establish new sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters—free from the regulation, laws, and moral suasion of any landlocked country. They’d be small city-states at first, although the aim is to have tens of millions of seasteading residents by 2050. Architectural plans for a prototype… Read more
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