✣ Highlights from the week online
American Christianity is growing stronger At thefederalist.com Glenn Stanton challenged the myth of Christian decline in the United States. Recent research had shown that Christianity was actually growing stronger, he said. The research, by Sean Bock and Landon Schnabel, academics at Harvard and Indiana Bloomington University, found that “intense” Christian faith had not declined at all. The proportion of Americans who “attend church more than once a week, pray daily, and accept the Bible as wholly reliable and deeply instructive to their lives has remained absolutely, steel-bar constant for the last 50 years or more,” Stanton wrote. Mainline churches may be “tanking”, he said, but their former members were going elsewhere. The trend meant that the proportion of religious people with a strong, active faith was growing – from 39 per cent to 47 per cent. “If your Christianity is reconstituted to the day’s fashion, don’t be surprised if people lose interest in it,” Stanton said. “[People] want the genuine deal, and the demographics on religion of the last few decades unmistakably support the fact.” Praying for the dead in the overhead locker Writing for the website of East Anglia diocese, Fr Henry Whisenant described an unusual request on an overseas flight. “What I’m going to ask might seem a bit strange,” said the man behind him. “My father is in the overhead compartment…” He was returning from his father’s cremation. A family of secular Jews, they had not had a religious service – but now he asked for some prayers for his departed father. “That’s how I ended up at the arrival gate of the airport, reciting the De Profundis,” Fr Whisenant wrote. “This incredible encounter would never have happened had I not been wearing clericals, and had I not taken that break from what I was doing.” Many such moments, he wrote, must pass him by every day. A town died – but its church survived The BBC reported on the unlikely survival of a church in a ghost town in Pennsylvania. The town, Centralia, was once home to 1,000 people, before a fire started burning through the coal mines underneath it – a fire that authorities were unable to put out. Now Centralia has six residents. But, although the former townsfolk may live many miles away now, they still come to the town’s blue-domed Ukrainian Greek Catholic church. Its loyal parishioners include John Mayernick Sr, who moved away 40 years ago. “This was our church,” he said. “As long as it’s going, I’ll keep coming.” Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, has made the church a pilgrimage site. Parish priest Fr Michael Hutsko said: “When you look back, it was saved for something greater. I can’t help believe that something truly spectacular is going to happen here.”
