...and look how much we've grown. Oops, never mind.
At a dinner party once upon a time, I mentioned to a table of non-believers and non-churchers how Christianity would be changing in the coming 21st century, with greater participation in developing electronic media, etc. That observation made some of them froth at the idea that the church would mature with a changing society. I heard a lot of sentences begin with, "Well, I don't go to church, but....", etc. It was actually, in a cruel Kingsley Amis manner, rather funny. It reminded me of a nurse in Catch-22, in response to Yosarrian's criticism of God, stating that it was a "loving, caring God in which I don't believe."
Anyway, after two weeks when "The Bible" is the highest rated show on TV and the papal election the most watched news story, it appears that we still have some relevance after all, as long as we don't listen to the "experts".
From the Wall Street Journal:
"...there’s a lot of ignorant, tendentious and even aggressive media chatter about the church right now, and it’s starting to grate. Church observers are blabbering away on cable and network news telling the church to get with the program, throwing around words like 'gender' and 'celibacy' and 'pedophile' and phrases like 'irrelevant to the modern world.'
I wouldn’t presume to tell Baptists or Lutherans or Orthodox Jews how they should interpret their own theology, what traditions to discard and what new ones to adopt, what root understandings are no longer pertinent. It would be presumptuous, and also deeply impolite in a civic sense. The world I came up in had some virtues, and one was that we gave each other a little more space, a little more courtesy both as individuals and organizations, never mind faiths. That kind of public courtesy is what has allowed America, with all its sharp-elbowed angers and disagreements, to operate.
Right now every idiot in town feels free to tell the church to get hopping...."