‘Religiously Unaffiliated’

Like many of you, I’m sick and tired of news sources hashing and rehashing last month’s presidential election.  I don’t want to hear about “Mitt Rominey and Bronco Bama” anymore either.  However, this particular NPR post caught my attention and was worth the reading.

This passage was particularly interesting to me:

“Young people just now entering adulthood are not only significantly more religiously unaffiliated compared with their elders today,” [Gregory Smith of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life] says, but they are also more religiously unaffiliated than previous generations of young people.

He cautions, however, against conflating the “nones” with nonbelievers.

“Those two things are not the same,” Smith says. The “nones’ are certainly less religious than those who say they belong to a religious group, but many are also believers.

“The absence of a connection to an organized religion is not the same as the absence of a religious belief or practice,” he says.

Click here to read the full article

Is America Indispensable or The Only Hope of the Earth?

Reblog from Patheos.com.

Here is a selective excerpt:

There is no doubt in my mind that both Romney and Obama described America in such religious and exceptionalist terms because they are trying to win the election. As a nation we want to believe that we are special–a source of categorical good in the world. We want to believe that we are the greatest nation in the world, but more than that, that we are making the world a better place…

…My concerns about such glowing descriptions of America is that they assume things about our nation that may or may not be true. And such assumptions keep us from looking at the state of our union with sober judgement and consequently from seeing our weaknesses and failures. As Christians, we ought to hope that America would be a source of good in the world. But it is the height of hubris to assume that we are the greatest nation in the world. As Christians, we ought to be concerned primarily with God’s judgments over and against the judgments of others. And further, we should be very careful in presuming to speak for [God].

Click here to read the full article