Elizabeth Drescher

Media excitement continues over the latest Pew poll showing continued growth in the religiously affiliated. But do such data really tell us what we need to know about the Four F’s of Contemporary American Spirituality: Family, Fido, Friends, and Food?

The questions that will stir again among my graduate students, and I suspect among many churchgoers generally, will likely not have much to do with the authenticity of the fragment and what it may or may not, in itself, say about the marital status of Jesus or the leadership status of women. Rather, they will be asking again to what exactly—if the Church continues to disregard the evidence of history and the voices of the faithful in engaging the world as it is and as it can be—are its current leaders listening?

Why don’t we hear about nonviolence from the pulpit? There is a complex theology behind the Gospel message of activist, transformative nonviolence that is easy for a homilist to set aside in favor of “God-loves-you!” Sunday messages that demand little from believers beyond robust self-esteem and a vague acceptance of God’s expectation that we generally do right by others. Thus, dusted off during Lent and the Easter season, the premodern language of sin, suffering, sacrifice, and salvation, as Marcus Borg has argued and Pew researchers have tracked, are poorly understood by Christians themselves.