Religious Ignorance in the United States
The Revealer shares two interesting stories: in the Washington Post, an article on Stephen Prothero's book on Religious (il)Literacy. Susan Jacoby writes:
Many of the religious allusions and metaphors explained by Prothero in his glossary were once as common as the universal reference points now supplied by television.... religion is no longer the air we breathe, and it is doubtful that schools can accomplish what parents and congregations cannot or will not in a society where people read fewer and fewer books of any kind -- including the book they consider the word of God.
In the magazine In Character, Bill Mckibben writes,
Every culture has its pathologies, and ours is self-reliance. From some mix of our frontier past, our Little House on the Prairie heritage, our Thoreauvian desire for solitude, and our amazing wealth we’ve derived a level of independence never seen before on this round earth. We’ve built an economy where we need no one else; with a credit card, you can harvest the world’s bounty from the privacy of your room. And we’ve built a culture much the same — the dream houses those architects build, needless to say, come with a plasma screen in every room. As long as we can go on earning good money in our own tiny niche, we don’t need a helping hand from a soul — save, of course, from the invisible hand that cups us all in its benign grip.