{"id":485,"date":"2008-03-11T13:53:06","date_gmt":"2008-03-11T13:53:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/03\/pew-sitters.html"},"modified":"2008-03-11T13:53:06","modified_gmt":"2008-03-11T13:53:06","slug":"pew-sitters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/03\/pew-sitters.html","title":{"rendered":"Pew Sitters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inside Catholic has posted a slew – a slew <\/em>-of reactions to the Pew study. The respondants are all over the map, and include a bishop or two. It’s well worth a read, and Inside Catholic <\/em>has done a great job of collecting this diverse responses.
\nEve Tushnet’s struck me as one of the wisest. You can’t design a program that will produce “vibrancy” around it. But maybe that’s what makes it wise:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
So the real “solution” always has to be, Do more of everything<\/em>. Better art, better journalism, better catechetical education, better living on our own parts (Catholics<\/em> are probably the number one reason people leave the Church), et familiar cetera. Whatever you can do that is Catholic, do more of that thing, so that the people who yearn for it can find<\/em> it. We often don’t find it at the parish church.<\/font><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Specifically, Americans are obsessed with finding narratives of personal discovery — finding our true selves. Narratives of transformation are more obvious in this respect than any other kind. Who wants to say, “Yeah, I was born Catholic and . . . am still Catholic now, so I guess that’s who I am . . . you know, by default”? That just doesn’t have the ring of radical self-discovery that Americans tend to consider “authentic.”<\/font><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
So perhaps what American Catholics need is a renewed devotion to the saints. The saints offer countless stories of people born Catholic who nonetheless underwent radical personal transformations in the fire of Divine love. Even saints who were born Catholic aren’t Catholic by default. If we need some kind of story to tell us who we are, we could do much worse than becoming a self by surrendering that self to Christ.<\/font><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inside Catholic has posted a slew – a slew -of reactions to the Pew study. The respondants are all over the map, and include a bishop or two. It’s well worth a read, and Inside Catholic has done a great job of collecting this diverse responses. Eve Tushnet’s struck me as one of the wisest.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nPew Sitters - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/03\/pew-sitters.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Pew Sitters - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Inside Catholic has posted a slew – a slew -of reactions to the Pew study. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}