Decline of Christianity in the US

Tim Keller bounces around some ideas from Ross Douthat’s upcoming book.

In the comments there are links and references to some other interesting documents. One from the Journal of Evangelical Theological Society on the “Fourth Great Awakening”. 

Keller references H. Richard Niebuhr’s “Toward the Independence of the Church”  Found that link on a set of links of online resources on H. Richard Niebuhr.  Here’s a quote from it. The whole piece is worth reading.

The relation of the church to civilization is necessarily a varying one since each of these entities is continually changing and each is subject to corruption and to conversion. The history of the relationship is marked by periods of conflict, of alliance, and of identification. A converted church in a corrupt civilization withdraws to its upper rooms, into monasteries and conventicles; it issues forth from these in the aggressive evangelism of apostles, monks and friars, circuit riders and missionaries; it relaxes its rigorism as it discerns signs of repentance and faith; it enters into inevitable alliance with converted emperors and governors, philosophers and artists, merchants and entrepreneurs, and begins to live at peace in the culture they produce under the stimulus of their faith; when faith loses its force, as generation follows generation, discipline is relaxed, repentance grows formal, corruption enters with idolatry, and the church, tied to the culture which it sponsored, suffers corruption with it. Only a new withdrawal followed by a new aggression can then save the church and restore to it the salt with which to savor society. This general pattern has been repeated three times in the past: in the ancient world, in the medieval, and in the modern. It may be repeated many times in the future.

Upset men and the happy women who love them. 

Nice piece on CS Lewis and Purgatory.