Why Liberal Christianity is Changing and Dying

This is an excellent op-ed piece over at the New York Times by Ross Douthat.  A sample:

Both religious and secular liberals have been loath to recognize this crisis. Leaders of liberal churches have alternated between a Monty Python-esque “it’s just a flesh wound!” bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction. (In a 2005 interview, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop explained that her communion’s members valued “the stewardship of the earth” too highly to reproduce themselves.)

It's not so much triumphalist as it is sad.

J. Kameron Carter on Whiteness and Christianity

"The 'strength' by which whiteness became a fait accompli is the strength by which Christianity was quite violently severed from its Jewish roots and subsequently redeployed, again quite violently, as the ground of Western civilization and white cultural nationalism. In short, modern Western civilization is, in the strictest sense of the term, a racial accomplishment, the accomplishment of whiteness. But this accomplishment is a distinctively modern 'Christian' accomplishment, an accomplishment rooted in the refusal to understand Christian identity inside Jewish covenantal life... Alas, Christianity became the white man's religion."

p 286, Race: A Theological Account by J. Kameron Carter

Gregory Wolfe on Thomas Kinkade's Legacy

Check it out in this Wall Street Journal article.

How to Resist Greed

"One danger is that we might seek to build up our bank account of righteousness through our giving. A strategy to combat this is to give frivolously. Someone might say, “Why did you give them money? They’re just going to buy alcohol.” But this frivolous giving is basically a way of saying, “To hell with the world and worldly success.” Ultimately, it’s a way of tearing up dollar bills in the middle of the street."

Rusty Reno in an interview for the publication Fermentations.