Are Religious Leaders Really Worried About Marriage And Fertility Trends?
(ANALYSIS) Let’s start with a question: Have you heard leaders in your congregation discuss any of this information in a setting that will reach active members, as opposed to special events that draw the “usual suspects” in the flock (maybe 10-20% of members) that attend just about everything?
OK, I intentionally left a crucial hole in that question — the vague “this information” reference. Why did I do that? Because the online dots I want to connect are too complex to describe in a tiny cluster of words.
Early in the Rational Sheep timeline, I noted that I understand readers do not have lots of extra time to read everything online that they probably want to read or even need to read. This is especially true for super-busy clergy, parents with children, tired teachers with work to grade, etc.
Trust me: I know that. I don’t have enough time and energy to read everything that I want to read. But I manage to read quite a bit and I want to pass some of that along to readers who support this project.
Thus, early on, I said that — every now and then — I would try to craft posts that expose Rational Sheep readers to pieces of crucial information, and URLs, that I believe pastors, parents, teachers and counselors truly need to see.
Thus, there are the “think pieces” that I usually run on weekends, in which I point readers to a specific online feature while adding my own commentary and, often, bytes of related information (such as “On Religion” columns from my past).
This post will be long, but I have done what I can to condense the information, while allowing readers (who have extra time) to follow links to the complete articles. Once again, I want to connect Rational Sheep dots.
Start here, with an Aaron Renn link pointing readers to a must-read article by Joshua Konstantinos, author of “Sleeping on a Volcano: The Worldwide Demographic Decline and the Economic and Geopolitical Implications.” That sobering Aporia headline: “Sterile Polygamy — The mating system we accidentally built.”
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.