That Was The Week That Was

Posted on by Chris Gehrz

This week I questioned my own skepticism about miraculous healing. Elsewhere:

• Half of the country’s Christian congregations have 65 or fewer attenders — half what the attendance level was at the start of the century.

• Meanwhile, not quite half of Americans have watched church online during the COVID pandemic — and one-third of them don’t normally attend church.

• I wasn’t quite sure which verb tense to use just now… how do we know when a pandemic is over?

• In any event, it sure seems like COVID is sparking a revolution in how Americans think about work.

• In short, maybe Americans are learning to decelerate.

Joe Biden worshipping at a church in South Carolina in 2019 – Creative Commons (Adam Schultz)

• Later this month, America’s second Catholic president will meet with the leader of his church.

• I’ve taken a few weekends off this fall, so I didn’t get to share any links about the death of comedian Norm Macdonald. But here’s a more recent reflection on his relationship with Christianity.

• In my religious biography of Charles Lindbergh, I said a bit about the origins of missionary aviation — a project that continues to the present day.

• According to one progressive Christian, fundamentalism is not only a conservative phenomenon.

• Who are “elite evangelicals,” and how do they wrestle with the allure of “respectability”?

• Amid declining enrollment at most institutions of higher learning, some conservative Christian colleges have been growing… and they’ve even set up their own network apart from the larger Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.

• CCCU president Shirley Hoogstra talked to David Brooks and Anne Snyder about the value of Christian higher ed.

Nyvall Hall, North Park University
Nyvall Hall at North Park University

• North Park became the latest university to have its faculty vote no confidence in its president.

• According to the Wall Street Journal, wealthy universities — including one of the largest Christian universities in the U.S. — are “steering parents into no-limit federal loans to cover rising tuition, leaving many poor and middle-class families with debt they can’t repay.”

• Having helped ruin how we think about colleges and universities, U.S. News is turning its sights on schools.

• Meet the hedge fund that’s helping to destroy newspapers around the country.

• And no, there are not “two sides” to the Holocaust.