Thursday, July 11, 2019

Millennial Nuns

Listen Up.  I won't be linking to HuffPo very often.  A fascinating article about the increase in vocations after fifty years of decline.
The presumption, I had always thought, was that the U.S. is on a steady, if bumpy, progressive drift. Books published about America’s demographic destiny like to warn religious folks to be afraid of the young. Each successive generation, the thinking goes, wants to exercise more choice over what they eat, over how they live, over who they love, over their dreams, over their truths. The young aren’t interested in tradition or moral constraints.
It is HuffPo, so be prepared to be annoyed at some parts.  But it is an interesting piece.

4 comments:

james said...

It seems fitting that the more demanding orders are more popular.

I remember kvetching about the "seeker-sensitive" direction one church was taking. "If I wanted to learn about Buddhism, I would go to a place where they did Buddhism!"

sykes.1 said...

Could this be a byproduct of an increased religiosity and a more conservative Catholicism? It is sometimes observed that the percentage of Orthodox Jews is increasing, because they have more children. This is especially true in Israel, and the original socialist/communist generation is being replaced by decidedly conservative Orthodox Jews. Even in the US the dominant Reform/Conservative movements are in decline.

The mainstream Protestant churches, and even parts of the Catholic Church, have been thoroughly feminized and cut loose from the Christian tradition. The Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran and other mainline Protestant denominations have notoriously abandoned much of Scripture (RIP sola scriptura) or reinterpreted it in radical, essentially anti-Christian ways. And all those denominations have been rejected by a large fraction of what used to be American Protestantism, and the rejections continue.

As Mark Steyn famously said years ago, "the future belongs to those who show up." Maybe there is hope for our society.

Christopher B said...

sykes, I think it's more general than that, or you wouldn't see similar young men and women drawn to Islam.

Texan99 said...

What if I have freedom but life feels empty and meaningless? What if I have order and it feels the same? What if I'm rich, poor, sober, intoxicated, popular, isolated in splendid privacy?

We've seen these swings from hedonism to doctrinaire religion before. No trend survives if people are still left feeling their lives are empty or meaningless. We're suckers for the next thing that comes along: surely this will do it! Why do we think Islam does so well converting fanatics?