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Church and Culture

Dreher

It’s painfully obvious to me how fragile things are. How fragile — we’ve spent so much time, a millennium, building our institutions, and it turns out that they are very fragile. Things can change in an instant. We are going to have to come to grips with the question of whether or not our faith is prepared to endure suffering and loss. Because we are going to face a lot of that in the years to come.

Elle

• Douthat
• Dreher

Douthat

But the Elle essay suggests yet another understanding of how secularism interacts with spiritual experience. In this scenario, the key feature of the secular world-picture isn’t that it requires people to reinterpret their numinous experiences as strictly psychological events; it’s simply that it discourages people who have such experiences from embracing any kind of systematic (that is, religious/theological) interpretation of what’s happened to them, and then as a corollary discourages them from seeking out a permanent communal space (that is, a religious body) in which to further interact with these ultimate realities. Under secularism, in other words, most people who see a ghost or have a vision or otherwise step into the supernatural are still likely to believe in the essential reality of their encounter with the otherworldly or transcendent; they’re just schooled to isolate the experience, to embrace it as an interesting (and often hopeful) mystery without letting it call them to the larger conversion of life that most religious traditions claim that the capital-S Supernatural asks of us in return.

• 10 Powerful Women
• 14 women
• another list
• more text

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/opinion/david-brooks-the-big-university.html?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2015/10/06/a-three-tiered-universe-the-earth-heavens-and-seas-rjs/

http://www.peteenns.com/christian-unity-the-problem-with-being-specific/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/06/the-one-number-thats-eerily-good-at-predicting-your-success-in-love/