The lamentable lack of official gayness at Gordon College was covered by the Hamilton Chronicle this week, and I hear a Boston Globe story may be coming…
All posts tagged religion
La presse!
Leaving the garden
One of my favorite bloggers, John Remy of Mind on Fire, asked me to write a post for MoF’s series Leaving the Garden, which asks people to reflect on their journey away from religious conviction in a narrative fashion. I heartily support this, since talking about religion/irreligion solely in terms of intellectual arguments can be tiresome. My post just went up here. The opening:
The first garden I remember was by our country house in Ohio, near Steubenville, a little town nine miles from the Pennsylvania border. We were there because my father wanted to attend Franciscan University, as it was a hotbed of charismatic Catholicism at the time. But by the time I was six, we moved from Ohio for the same reason we had moved there from Phoenix: my father’s all-consuming passion for finding the truth about God.
It always took us to unexpected places. (More…)
Humanist Small Group notes
For a couple months now, a little group of people have been meeting biweekly under the name Humanist Small Group. It was started by a classicist and teaching fellow (I believe is his position) at Harvard who wanted regular fellowship with like-minded folks, more than was facilitated by the social events the Harvard humanist community hosts once a month or so.
Rick Heller has chronicled the last two meetings, the latter of which was this Saturday. As you can see, we covered a lot of standard ground, and more unexpectedly virtue ethics came up at a few points. As it did earlier this month when I stopped by the University of Chicago and sat in on a seminar by Deirdre McCloskey on virtue ethics, Christianity and capitalism. (Guess there’s more than one way to do it.)
I find all humanist/etc. groups to be fraught with theoretical difficulties. For example: Is any group labeled “humanist” a protest group against religion? If not, why does it exist? If so (and surely it is, if only to a very small degree), to what degree should religion and irreligion be a focus of conversation? But refreshingly, these have not seriously affected the actual meetings, and perhaps exist merely in my head.
A related issue that did come up, at the end, was the suggestion that the “humanist movement,” being full of individualistic, highly opinionated people, may never become unified and cohesive enough to be a real force in society. I made the suggestion that, perhaps, but perhaps there is room for more specialized groups within the wider movement. And of course there is Sam Harris’s suggestion that there be no movement at all.
The holy or the broken hallelujah?
So David Bazan of Pedro the Lion fame played a show at Gordon College Thursday night, with Damien Jurado opening.
It was kind of perfect — a singer who has blurred the line between Christian and secular music, playing at one of the the more freethinking Christian colleges, for an audience of students and alumni who end up broadly agnostic at higher rates than you might expect. One of them asked during the Q&A, “Are you indifferent to or ambivalent about religion?” He said no, but made some non-propositional insinuations. And mentioned he was reading Bart Ehrman.
You could almost hear the faith (of a certain kind) being lost during the finale, a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” –
(video from a previous show.)
His new CD has a song apparently about the breakup of Pedro the Lion and his new solo career, which at first seemed a little self-indulgent… but I quite like it now. (starts at 1:05)
New survey on (ir)religion in the U.S.
A new Pew survey on religion in America was released yesterday.
The most interesting finding to me is the “Unaffiliated” group, which makes up 16.1 percent of the total adult population. About a third of those are at least somewhat religious, just not any religion in particular, leaving the nonreligious total at 10.3 percent — 1.6 atheist, 2.4 agnostic, and 6.3 just plain secular. A quick read might suggest that the whole 16.1 percent is nonreligious, so I want to emphasize the more accurate 10.3 percent figure.
[Update: I generally love the think tank Center for Inquiry, so I was slightly disappointed to see them eliding "unaffiliated" with "non-religious" this press release.]
Breaking it down by percentage, apparently about 16 percent of the nonreligious in the U.S. identify as atheist, 23 percent as agnostic, and 61 percent as secular. I suppose this might inform the debate about whether people should identify as atheists or not.
Unaffiliated is also the fastest-growing group: only 7.3 percent of the population says they were unaffiliated as a child, meaning it’s more than doubled in the past generation, despite not having a very high retention rate (many people raised unaffiliated later become religious), and the unaffiliated are disproportionately young.
The 16.1 percent figure basically confirms the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), which found 14.3 percent of the U.S. population identifying as nonreligious, as well as 16 percent having a secular outlook. (The two groups probably mostly overlapped.)
Other points of interest:
- Unitarian Universalists come in a 0.3 percent. Assuming roughly 225 million adults in the U.S., that gives us about 675,000 UUs. (Another blogger estimates 683,000.) What’s shocking is that the Unitarian Universalist Association’s own figure is about a quarter of this figure, suggesting that most self-identified UUs aren’t a member of any UU church (society, etc.). More discussion at Philocrites and the above blogger, and elsewhere no doubt.
- Quakers clock in at “less than 0.3 percent,” meaning “less than 675,000.” Perhaps a lot less, since our own count is only 87,000, but as with UUs, there are probably many who identify as Quaker who aren’t in the membership rolls. Don’t see much discussion of this yet, perhaps because it doesn’t actually tell us anything we didn’t already know.
- “Spiritual but not religious” are also a tiny “less than 0.3 percent.” It would be interesting to compare this to the larger percentage (if I recall correctly) found by the ARIS.
Quaker meeting fulla UUs
I’m going to my first Unitarian Universalist (UU) conference this weekend — WinterCon, for Boston-area young adult UUs. I’ll be facilitating a Quaker meeting in one of the workshop slots, at the kind request of one of the organizers, who came to a Quaker-inspired meditation I hosted in December. I’ll post an update on how it goes.
I haven’t written here about Quakers yet (at least not in depth), but to make a long story short, Continue reading →
The scarves of scholars & Arabs
It snowed today, and my lips are getting chapped — time to get a scarf!
Any money I have for clothes is going towards a coat first, so I’ll probably just find something at my mother’s house over Thanksgiving. But allow me to share my two winter neckwear aspirations. Continue reading →
