“The Weekend Wanderer” is a weekly curated selection of news, stories, resources, and media on the intersection of faith and culture for you to explore through your weekend. Wander through these links however you like and in any order you like. Disclaimer: I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed within these articles but have found them thought-provoking.
“Decline in American Christian observance has slowed, Pew study finds” – Fiona André at Religion News Service: “The Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Study’s 2023-24 edition, released on Wednesday (Feb. 26), points at changes in American religious observance, including those identifying as Christian, stabilizing after years of steady decline and growth of the religiously unaffiliated leveling off. Generally, a decline in American religiousness observed since at least 2007 has slowed over the past four to five years. However, Pew Research Center noted in its report that the country is heading toward less religiousness. ‘The U.S. is a spiritual place, a religious place, where we’ve seen a signs of religious stabilization in the midst of longer-term decline,’ said Gregory Smith, a senior associate director of research at Pew, during a press briefing. Now on its third edition, Pew released similar reports in 2007 and 2014, aiming to fill a gap in recognized, reliable data sources on America’s religious composition, beliefs and practices. From July 2023 to March 2024, the center polled 35,000 adult respondents randomly selected from the U.S. Postal Service address registry. This third edition was to be published in 2021 but was postponed to avoid flawed results due to the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on religious life. After dropping from 78% to 71% between 2007 and 2014, the share of U.S. adults identifying as Christian has now dropped to 62%, according to the report. However, it notes this figure has been relatively stable since 2019, oscillating between 60% and 64%.”
“The Truth of a Love Supreme” – Justin Giboney at Christianity Today: “Legendary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane called his album A Love Supreme an offering to God. The four-suite musical masterpiece was a spiritual declaration, he explained in the liner notes, signifying the marriage between his music and his faith in God. The Apostles’ Creed wasn’t Coltrane’s statement of faith. But he was raised in the church, and his artistic expression showed that influence alongside evidence of God’s common grace. A Love Supreme ‘mixes modern jazz with the ecstatic energy of the Black gospel,’ said the late jazz enthusiast and cultural critic Greg Tate, and it was structured like a church service, moving from rising chants of worship, to a fiery sermon, to an instrumental interplay resembling a call and response between pulpit and pew, then to a sweet, forward-looking benediction. The album was recorded in 1964, the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the same year Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize. Listening to it now, it’s hard not to make that connection—and to notice that this movement was pursuing and living into a love supreme without Coltrane’s theological ambiguity. Civil Rights was a movement that lived out the truth of the Negro spirituals that activists sang, an unabashedly Christian endeavor in philosophy and practice alike. The love that Christians in the Civil Rights Movement sought to embody was not self-interested or limited to affirmation. It was a love they hadn’t received from this nation but one they knew to be necessary and real. They knew a love truly supreme was possible in Christ because the Bible said so.”
“Douthat on Belief” – Alan Jacobs at The Homebound Symphony: “The central and absolutely essential premise of Ross Douthat’s new book Believe, the point from which the whole argument begins, is this: There is a genus of human belief and practice called ‘religion,’ of which Christianity is one of the species. My problem with regard to Ross’s book is that I have come quite seriously to doubt this premise. My larger problem is that I don’t know quite how to do without this premise, since it is so deeply embedded in almost all discourse on … well, I guess I have to say on religion. My difficulty was brought home to me when I was writing the Preface to my forthcoming book on Paradise Lost. That book is one of a series called Lives of the Great Religious Books, which meant that in said Preface I needed to explain and justify my claim that Milton’s poem really is a religious book — which, I argue, it is in some ways, though not in others: its relationship to Christianity is radically different than that of, say, the Book of Common Prayer, the subject of my previous book in the PUP series. In order to do this, I had to take the concept of “religion” seriously. Or semi-seriously.”
“70 Christians found beheaded in church in DRC” – Open Doors: “Seventy Christians have been found beheaded in a church in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in what’s the latest devastating attack on believers in the north east of the country. According to field sources, at around 4am last Thursday (13 February) suspected militants from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) – a group with ties to so-called Islamic State (IS) – approached homes in Mayba in the territory of Lubero, saying: ‘Get out, get out and don’t make any noise.’ Twenty Christian men and women came out and were captured. Shaken by this incident, people from the local community in Mayba later gathered to work out how to release those held captive. However, ADF militants surrounded the village and captured a further 50 believers. All 70 of those kidnapped were taken to a Protestant church in Kasanga where they were tragically killed.”
“How Garbage Collectors Can Refresh Our Theology: Scraping back the veneer called ‘vocation'” – Gustavo H. R. Santos in Comment: “Some questions have the power to change our lives. Five years ago, I decided to leave a management consulting career in Brazil to study theology in Canada. ‘I’m following my vocation,’ I said to a friend, ‘and that’s what everybody should do.’ As good friends do, he listened carefully and, as sensible people do, he expanded my imagination with a question: ‘Do you really believe that garbage collectors, for instance, care about vocation?’ The question pierced my soul, but I was not yet ready to acknowledge the rawness of my theories. ‘I don’t know if they do,’ I responded. ‘What I know is that I do.’ How considerate. I clearly needed some help. My theology of work was forged in the fires of modernity and therefore highly “professionalized.” It was easy to talk about work and vocation for lawyers, doctors, and engineers but not for bus drivers, secretaries, and hairdressers. The ideas behind my theology stemmed from a worldview in which I could choose to be whatever I wanted so long as I had the resources to do it. It took me some time to realize that for thousands of years choosing one’s work was not an option. And there I was, denying my creatureliness with my modern power, trying to pull myself up by my bootstraps to find my way in the world. I thought that knowing my gifts and the needs of the world would suffice. Unintentionally, I covered my privileged position of agency with a cheap spiritual veneer and called it ‘vocation.’ It turns out my theology was excluding 80 percent of the world’s workforce. Of course these groups experience work differently, but shouldn’t they also be able to account for the theological trajectory of their work?Our churches are full of both professionals and working-class labourers, so if we want to teach about work from a biblical perspective as part of our discipleship, we need a theology infused with a broader paradigm of labour.”
“Pope beats back speculation of imminent death or conclave as he continues pneumonia recovery” – Nicole Winfield and Silvia Stellacci in AP News: ” Pope Francis continued his slow recovery from double pneumonia on Thursday, beating back speculation of an imminent death, resignation or conclave and signaling that he was still very much in charge, albeit in a weakened state. The 88-year-old pope once again slept well during the night at Rome’s Gemelli hospital, had breakfast and resumed his therapy Thursday morning in good spirits, the Vatican said. The results of more medical tests were expected later Thursday. Doctors on Wednesday reported further slight improvements in his clinical condition as his hospital stay neared the two-week mark on Friday. They said the kidney insufficiency that had been detected in recent days had receded, blood tests showed a slight improvement and a chest CT scan showed that his complex lung infection was taking the ‘normal evolution’ as it is being treated. The prognosis remained guarded, however. The pope, who had part of one lung removed as a young man, is still receiving high flows of supplemental oxygen and respiratory physiotherapy to help his lungs expel fluid. But he hasn’t had any more respiratory crises since Saturday, the Vatican said.”
Music: Vampire Weekend, “Hope,” from Only God Was Above Us
Discover more from Matthew Erickson
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Matthew Erickson 