American Culture

“A growing number of Americans do not follow a religion. But chances are that the details of their lives — from their phones and their politics to their dinner plates and how they raise their kids — are still ruled by some sort of a religious impulse, says author David Zahl.” - RNS

According to FollowTheMoney.org, “pro-choice abortion-policy organizations outspend pro-life ones, by anywhere from 20% to 900%, nearly every year, going back to 1990 … for example, in 2018, pro-life groups put a total of $4.8 million toward independent spending and campaign contributions at the state and federal level … pro-choice groups spent $50.7 million.” - Was

“Americans’ confidence in the church or organized religion continues to erode, with 36% now saying they have ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in organized religion, establishing another new low point in Gallup’s trend.” - Gallup

“Theologians and ethicists, playwrights and lyricists, therapists and politicians, historians and pundits—like everyone else in society—all could have their say. But more and more, each would have to face up ultimately to the supposed precision of the scientist, who among them all seems to have a lock on reality, or at least on the tools for discovering reality.” - WORLD

“The Accelerating Acceptance report, conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of the LGBT advocacy group GLAAD, showed that respondents age 18-34 were much less tolerant of LGBT people than in the prior two years’ surveys.” - BPNews

“Tolkien refrained from probing the depths of his evil characters by design—since the reality and, indeed, the banality of evil does not require elaborate fictionalization” - TGC

“For decades now our politics and culture have been dominated by a particular philosophy of freedom. It is a philosophy of liberation from family and tradition, of escape from God and community… a philosophy that has defined our age, though it is far from new.

“With so much of our lives revolving around media consumption, it behooves us to develop what Tony Reinke, in his new book Competing Spectacles: Treasuring Christ in the Media Age, calls ‘a theology of visual culture.’” - Christianity Today

“U.S. births are at their lowest point in 32 years and fertility is at a record low, statistics released May 15 show. Births and fertility rates both fell 2 percent in 2018 from the previous year, the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Md., said.” - BRNow

“At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it.