It appears that not only is church attendance declining overall, church leaders fear that religion and churchgoing is becoming increasingly seen as something that mainly women do, which is likely to lead to even greater male defections from religious institutions. Stephen Colbert looks at some novel attempts to boost attendance and to also give worship a more manly image.
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This quite poignant article looks at the anguish of clergy who realize that they either no longer believe in a god or have serious doubts. The problems seem to start during the seminary years and appears to be quite widespread which makes one wonder how many clergy are actually closeted non-believers.
In interviews with 32 men and women from Pentecostal, evangelical, mainline Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and Mormon backgrounds, they discovered that many, like Dunphy, started wrestling with doubt in seminary.
Most said they kept quiet out of fear of disappointing others or because they didn’t have anyone to talk things through with.
“I wanted to believe in God; all those years, I wanted to,” one former Presbyterian clergywoman says in the book of her time in seminary. “I wasn’t really sure if I did or not, but I wanted to.”
…And once the seminarians were leading congregations, they reported even more isolation and frustration.
“You do a lot of crying,” a Mormon bishop says in the book. “You try to talk to your wife about it, but she’s still pretty orthodox, so it’s hard on her. You’re alone. You’ve got no one to talk to because you’re a bishop … So it tears you apart.”
If there is one job where you need to be totally in sync with your institution’s mission, it has be to that of religious clergy. Having to tell people all the time to believe in something that you yourself think is false could well lead to at least misery, if not depression and eventual breakdown.
I thought that legal challenges to saying the Pledge of Allegiance in schools because of objections to the phrase ‘under God’ had been exhausted when several federal Courts of Appeals had all agreed that it was constitutional and that the lack of conflicting rulings made it unlikely that the US Supreme Court would hear the case.
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Fairleigh Dickinson University conducted a survey in relation to the of the upcoming ruling by the US Supreme Court on the Greece prayer case that I have written extensively about. It asked 833 people two questions.
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Over the weekend I watched this film that was nominated for four Academy Awards including best picture, actress (Judy Dench), adapted screenplay, and music score, although it did not win any. It is an excellent film, one of the best that I have seen in recent years, and one that I can strongly recommend to readers.
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The newly-released film Heaven is for Real is based on the preposterous story of a young boy who supposedly died for a short while, came back to life, and told his family about what he had seen in heaven and the people he met.
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Today is Easter Sunday, the day when Christians around the world celebrate the anniversary of Jesus returning to life as a rabbit and distributing chocolate eggs to all his followers. From reader Norm, I received link to this article by a geneticist Victoria Metcalf about whether the story of the Easter Bunny is harmful to children.
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In many traditional cultures, marriages are arranged by the parents, often using matchmakers. Reader Tim sent along this link about a dating service in Israel aimed at ultra-Orthodox Jews that circumvents the traditional matchmaker’s role for those cases in which the young person does not fit the desired profile and is seen as a ‘difficult’ case, though the things that cause the problems are those that the rest of us might see as desirable qualities.
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Joe Puckett, Jr, a minister at the Hartville Church of Christ that is about an hour’s drive from where I live, has invited me to a debate. The topic we have agreed upon is God Does Not Exist that I will affirm and he will deny. I know the proposition is a counter-intuitive one but I have reasons for choosing it.
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Religious people are upset that their views on creation are not being given sufficient deference in the TV series Cosmos and that the shows promote (oh, the horror!) evolution. The website Funny or Die has got hold of an alternative show that gives their side of the story. As you can see, the Biblical version of creation is pretty succinct.
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