Lake County Ohio Weal

  On the Persistence of Faith Amid Religious Decline Susan Bigelow Reynolds May 27, 2025 A sign at the counter of a vintage shop that I frequent reads: My grandmother owned it, my mother sold it, I just bought it back! Traditional religious faith, argues Christian Smith, has gone the way of something your grandparents owned, like, for example, a record player: a nostalgic artifact well-suited to the needs of another age but obsolete in our own. “When people can ask Alexa to play any song,” he explains by way of analogy, “they rarely think about vinyl records. And so obsolete items become decreasingly familiar to most people and, in time, associated with bygone eras.” Twenty years ago, Smith was right, at least about record players. I didn’t know anyone who still used one. My Millennial friends and I were content to download Death Cab for Cutie’s latest releases off iTunes for ninety-nine cents apiece and listen to them on our iPods. Today, however, a record player sits next to the ...

  Retreat & Resurgence Gerardo Martí May 27, 2025 There was a time when holding a BlackBerry felt like holding the future. Surgically precise thumb-typing, emails firing off at the speed of thought, the blinking red light—a heartbeat of connectivity—appealed to eager adopters of cutting-edge technology. Its reach exceeded 20 million users by around 2010. And then it was gone. The BlackBerry didn’t disappear because it was inferior. It disappeared because what we wanted from technology changed. As societal structures evolve, so do our tools, reflecting new desires and demands. German sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes obsolescence as a byproduct of social acceleration. I n a world ruled by speed, novelty, and optimization, institutions—even worldviews—lose their resonance not because they stop working, but because they no longer compete. What becomes obsolete is not what is old, but what no longer speaks to present experience. The importance of relevance was strikingly evident i...

  Christian Smith Suggests the American Religious Decline May be Irreversible Peter Steinfels May 27, 2025 Any all-star team of scholars of American religion would have to include Christian Smith. Smith’s extensive use of surveys and interviews in two books on young Americans and religion, Soul Searching (2005), with Melinda Lundquist Denton, and Souls in Transition (2009), with Patricia Snell, showed him a master of empirical research. At the same time, What Is a Person? (2010) placed him among the few sociologists ready and able to explore the philosophical underpinnings and ethical implications of their social-science methods. His twenty books over thirty-five years also tangle with topics like evangelical Biblicism, religious parenting, Church disaffiliation by young Catholics, and the New Atheism. He is a stalwart though subtle critic of “secularization theory”—that religious faith is inevitably destined to be dissolved, in Walter Lippmann’s phrase, by the “acids of modernity...

  Ask Better Questions Kaya Oakes June 2, 2025 My 2015 book The Nones Are Alright explored Americans’ shift away from organized religion. For a few years I did the circuit of conferences and church talks where people kept asking the same question: What can we do to bring people back? I never had an answer that made anyone happy, because I had no idea how to bring people back . The ship had already sailed, but people were still standing on the shoreline waiting for it to turn around.  A decade later, there have been more than a few books written on the same topic, from Tara Isabella Burton’s pop-culture history Strange Rites: New Religion for a Godless World to sociologist Ryan P. Burge’s charts-and-graphs-crammed The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going. They ask similar questions about the future of religious affiliation, and they come to similar conclusions. Religion is fading away, but faith and belief, somehow, are not. The problem is that ho...