{"id":5040,"date":"2006-10-25T08:50:19","date_gmt":"2006-10-25T08:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/the-niches.html"},"modified":"2006-10-25T08:50:19","modified_gmt":"2006-10-25T08:50:19","slug":"the-niches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/the-niches.html","title":{"rendered":"The niches"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Just a couple of thoughts, inspired by your comments.<\/p>\n<p>It seems to me that the central question of the Bottum essay is this:<\/p>\n<p>Catholicism was &quot;contained&quot; in those nooks and crannies in which the swallows rested. Catholic culture &#8211; high and low, was the means by which the faith was expressed, learned, lived and passed on. <\/p>\n<p>For whatever reason, that&#8217;s gone from Catholic life in the US, for the most part. <\/p>\n<p>What now? <\/p>\n<p>By what means will the faith in Christ through His Church be preserved and transmitted?<\/p>\n<p>Can the richness of this faith be sustained and passed on through <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>liturgies that are, in the ways they are experienced on the ordinary parish level, present-oriented, with few referents of any sort to 2000 years of Catholic tradition?<\/li>\n<li>Churches that are largely empty of any of the symbolism that has conveyed aspects of the faith for centuries?<\/li>\n<li>Preaching and teaching that is rooted in perspectives and trends of the past half-century and no further?<\/li>\n<li>Catechesis that is primarily oriented to the affective and experiential?<\/li>\n<li>A broader social context in which the goal of self-fulfillment and the level of material wealth and comfort has overwhelmed, even in religious circles, the call of Jesus to live sacrificially?<\/li>\n<li>A broader social context, assumed by many, that truth is relative, that the Christian claims are fine for those who believe them, but not necessarily cosmically meaningful?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I could go on, and I don&#8217;t mean to sound negative, because I don&#8217;t think things are that bad at all &#8211; I&#8217;m just trying to reset the discussion &#8211; the structures in which Catholicism was rather easily, if not always deeply, passed on are mostly gone in the US and Europe. The question, not one borne of nostalgia or wishful thinking is &#8211; well, what next? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just a couple of thoughts, inspired by your comments. It seems to me that the central question of the Bottum essay is this: Catholicism was &quot;contained&quot; in those nooks and crannies in which the swallows rested. Catholic culture &#8211; high and low, was the means by which the faith was expressed, learned, lived and passed&hellip;<\/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-5040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The niches - 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\/2006\/10\/the-niches.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The niches - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Just a couple of thoughts, inspired by your comments. It seems to me that the central question of the Bottum essay is this: Catholicism was &quot;contained&quot; in those nooks and crannies in which the swallows rested. Catholic culture &#8211; high and low, was the means by which the faith was expressed, learned, lived and passed&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/the-niches.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2006-10-25T08:50:19+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The niches - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/the-niches.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"The niches - Via Media","og_description":"Just a couple of thoughts, inspired by your comments. It seems to me that the central question of the Bottum essay is this: Catholicism was &quot;contained&quot; in those nooks and crannies in which the swallows rested. Catholic culture &#8211; high and low, was the means by which the faith was expressed, learned, lived and passed&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/the-niches.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2006-10-25T08:50:19+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/the-niches.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/the-niches.html","name":"The niches - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2006-10-25T08:50:19+00:00","dateModified":"2006-10-25T08:50:19+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/the-niches.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/the-niches.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/the-niches.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"The niches"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. 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\/5040","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=5040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5040\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}