1. Business Insider: A Fascinating New Poll Shows That Americans Are Losing Faith In God
A new Harris Poll released today reveals that only 74% of Americans believe in God, an 8% decline since 2009.
Before today, U.S. adults had remained fairly consistent in their religious beliefs — 82% of U.S. respondents previously reported that they believed there was a God since 2005.
In another decline, only 54% of Americans are now "absolutely certain" in God's existence, a 12% decrease over the last decade. ...
2. Daily Mail: The Bible-ignorant [British] youngsters who can't tell Noah from Adam: Third of children didn't know Nativity story came from Holy Book
- One in three Britons didn't know where story of birth of Jesus could be read
- Some 54 per cent of children never read Bible stories by adults, study found
- Campaigners now fear the religion is in a state of permanent retreat
3. Christian Newswire: 92% of Americans Own a Bible but Only 16% Read it Daily
4. Religion News Service: Respect for clergy drops, but among Republicans, not so much
(RNS) Clergy used to rank near the top in polls asking Americans to rate the honesty and ethics of people in various professions. This year, for the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 1977, fewer than half of those polled said clergy have "high" or "very high" moral standards.
But opinions on clergy differed markedly by party, with Republicans viewing them far more favorably than Democrats.
Overall, 47 percent of respondents to the survey gave clergy "high" or "very high" ratings, a sharp drop in confidence from the 67 percent of Americans who viewed them this way in 1985.
Among Republicans, 63 percent gave clergy one of the two top ratings for ethics, compared with 40 percent of Democrats. ...
5. Economist: All about Adam
A furious—and political—debate about the origins of mankind ...
... A quest for certainty is an American tradition. Old World believers often inherit religion passively, like a cultural artefact. Americans, an individualistic bunch, are more likely to switch churches or preachers until they find a creed that makes sense to them. They admire fundamental texts (the constitution, for example) that plain citizens may parse for immutable truths.
At the same time, the literalist faith is in crisis. Young Americans are walking away from the stern denominations that have held such sway over post-war American life, from Billy Graham's crusades to the rise of the religious right. After they hit 18, half of evangelical youngsters lose their faith; entering a public university is especially perilous. As a generation, millennials (those born between the early 1980s and 2000s), are unimpressed by organised anything, let alone organised religion. Many young adults told the Barna Group, an evangelical research outfit, that they felt stifled by elders who demonised secular America. Young Christians are more accepting of gay rights than their elders. In a challenge to creationists, a quarter of young adults told Barna's study that their churches were "anti-science".
The seeming paradox of a strong faith in crisis is explained by rigidity: that which cannot bend may break instead. ...
6. The Dish: The Language Of Certainty In Atheism
7. Faith & Leadership: Mainline Protestants and disruptive innovation
Mainline Protestants can still have an exciting and life-giving future -- if they learn the lessons of disruptive innovation from the steel industry and other organizations, say three Christian institutional leaders. ...
8. Call & Response Blog: Denominational leaders as bridge-builders
... The image of a bridge was one powerful expression of the issues they face now and anticipate facing in the future. But what most struck me were the ways in which, rather than despairing of their bridging roles, these leaders accepted the challenges and articulated the issues with clarity and grace.
First, they understood themselves as being "bridgers" who manage polarity and tension between people, issues or factions in the denomination. ...
... Second, these leaders saw their role as being a bridge to support systems and resources for congregations that are disbursed. ...
... Third, guest Marlon Hall, Houston pastor, filmmaker and leader of the Awakenings Movement, helped the gathered denominational leaders think about the ways in which they are a bridge between "the powerful and the engaged," between the status quo and disruptive innovation. ...
9. Religion News Service: Why evangelicalism needs controversies like Duck Dynasty
10. Pew Forum: Religious Hostilities Reach Six-Year High
11. Associated Press: Evangelicals mass in Peru amid boom
... Evangelicals have seen the most growth in Lima's teeming working class districts but more and more converts are coming from Peru's highlands thanks to proselytizing radio stations emerging in recent years in the region, said Rev. Juan Carlos Perez, a local leader of the Movimiento Misionero Mundial church. ...
... Peru and its capital remain bastions of Roman Catholicism. About three in four Peruvians identify themselves as Catholics. But evangelicals are on the rise, jumping from 5.2 percent of the population in 1981 to 12.5 percent in 2007, the last year for which government census figures are available.
Perez claims evangelicals now account for at least 20 percent of Peru's 30 million people, which would give it one of Latin America's highest growth rates. ...
12. Time: It's Social Ties—Not Religion—That Makes the Faithful Give to Charity
... Having found that religion and charity go hand-in-hand, Robert Putnam and I sought to understand why. The answer might surprise you. We initially thought that religious beliefs must foster a sense of charity—whether inspiration from biblical stories like the Good Samaritan or, perhaps, a fear of God's judgment for not acting charitably. However, we could find no evidence linking people's theological beliefs and their rate of giving—which also helps to explain why the "religion effect" varies little across different religions. The rates for charitable giving according to the Jumpstart survey are: 61 percent of Black Protestants; 64 % of Evangelical Protestants; 67 % of Mainline Protestants, 68 % of Roman Catholics, and 76 % of Jews. By contrast, only 46 % of the not religiously affiliated made any charitable giving.
Rather than religious beliefs, we found that the "secret ingredient" for charitable giving among religious Americans is the social networks formed within religious congregations. The more friends someone has within a religious congregation, the more likely that person is to give time, money, or both, to charitable causes. In fact, even non-religious people who have friends within a religious congregation (typically, because their spouse is a believer) are highly charitable—more so than strong believers who have few social ties within a congregation. ...
13. Christianity Today: Who Owns the Pastor's Sermon?
Church or pastor? When sermons become books that make millions in royalties, the answer is important.
Spoiler: Copyright law favors churches.
14. Jesus Creed: Who "attended" those earliest churches?
On the basis of a new approach at looking how to discern the social makeup of the earliest Christian house churches, one based more on housing space occupied than on ideal social types, Peter Oakes has offered to us a new way of thinking more realistically and concretely about who was in the earliest house churches. His book is called Reading Romans in Pompeii. ...
... The earliest churches, then, are not made up of pietists who wanted to study the Bible but ordinary Romans from all sorts of backgrounds, needs, yearnings, and connections — each bringing to the table different ears for the gospel. ...
... Undoubtedly, one the best books on Paul/Romans I've read in a long, long time. Oakes combines judicious historical sensitivities with solid exegetical insight, all wrapped into a proper caution that is not always observed among those who use social evidence.
15. The Bible and Culture: Social Description in Early Christianity
Here is an excellent post from Larry Hurtado reminding us that it is wrong to say that early Christianity was largely made up of impoverished slaves, women, minors, and the rural poor. This, is a complete myth. See below. ...
... Here's a sample from Meeks's now-classic work, The First Urban Christians (pp. 72-73): "the most active and prominent members of Paul's circle are people of high status inconsistency . . . They are upwardly mobile, their achieved status is higher than their attributed status." That is, e.g., people involved in trade, business, etc., whose energy and abilities enabled them to acquire a social status that they didn't inherit or have by way of being born into a traditional elite class.
There's much, much more to note. But this will do, hopefully, to steer interested readers toward a more accurate, less simplistic, view of the social makeup of the earliest circles of Christian believers.
16. Why are the virgin birth, empty tomb and resurrection controversial? - N. T. Wright
17. Euangelion: Sin and Death in Eastern Orthodox Theology
I introduced a nice book about Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology
... Thus, the most significant consequence of the Fall in light of the resurrection is the presence of death. So, according to Louth, it is Christ's conquest of death in his resurrection means that death rather than sin is central to the Orthodox understanding of the consequence of Adam's disobedience (70). ...
... Second, Louth presents the story of Adam is more the story of "everyman" than a story of the "first man". While not denying the latter, he says the Father's were interested in the former. In this sense the story is mythical. ...
... The more I think about it, I'm beginning to find these to be a more satisfying explanation than my inherited tradition. ...
Me too.
18. BioLogos: Long Life Spans in Genesis
... There are 30 age numbers we can get from Genesis chapter 5—three numbers for each of ten patriarchs: the age when a son was born, the number of years the patriarch lived after the son was born, and the total number of years the patriarch lived. For example, "When Adam had lived 130 years, he became the father of… Seth. The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were 800 years… Thus all the days that Adam lived were 930 years" (Genesis 5:3-5). We get similar accounts of Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah (though for Noah we have to go to Genesis 9:29 to see how old he was when he died).
The first thing more careful observation reveals about these 30 numbers is that all of them end with the digits 0, 2, 5, 7, or 9. You might not think that is too remarkable until you realize that it eliminates half of the possible numbers. It is like seeing a list of 30 numbers that are all even. We wouldn't think that was a random distribution of numbers. In fact, the odds of getting all thirty numbers to end with just these "approved" digits in a random distribution of ages are about one in a hundred million.[1] That should make us suspicious that Genesis 5 is merely giving a historical report. Something else must be going on here. ...
19. The Cultural Cognition Project - Yale Law School: Have Republicans changed views on evolution? Or have creationists changed party? Pew's (half-released) numbers don't add up ...
... Right away when I heard about the Pew poll, I turned to the results to see what the explanation was for the interesting -- truly! -- "shift" in Republican view: Were Republicans changing their positions on creationism or creationists changing their party allegiance?
And right away I ran into this logical inconsistency.
Surely, someone will clear this up, I thought.
But no.
Just the same predictable, boring "ha ha ha ha!" reaction.
Why let something as silly as logic get in the way of an opportunity to pound one's tribal chest & join in a unifying, polarizing group howl?
20. Huffington Post: Three Reasons Why Evolution Will Never Convince a Creationist
1) Evolution is not, strictly speaking, mentioned in the Bible, so a Creationist is not inclined to trust it. ...
2) People tend to assume that the two realms of science and faith must be in opposition to one another, or that when one is "right" on an issue the other cannot hold any merit in the conversation. ...
3) Starting from the "evolution" perspective is always taken to be challenging what is found in Genesis 1-3. Perhaps this seems obvious to you. But if that is where a person representing evolution starts, she or he has lost the Creationist from the get-go.
None of this way of approaching the conversation addresses the content of the Bible and the type of writings we find in them. This is, it seems to me, the central issue.
21. Spirit, Science, and Metaphysics: Scientists Claim That Quantum Theory Proves Consciousness Moves To Another Universe At Death
A book titled "Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the Nature of the Universe" has stirred up the Internet, because it contained a notion that life does not end when the body dies, and it can last forever. The author of this publication, scientist Dr. Robert Lanza who was voted the 3rd most important scientist alive by the NY Times, has no doubts that this is possible. ...
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