7 Comments
Jan 16, 2022Liked by JD Flynn

Ed. as a woman myself I hope to speak for all Pillar women in accepting you as a defacto 'perceptive woman'.

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Jan 16, 2022Liked by JD Flynn

Great to get to know Brendan.

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Stats overload!

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For the record: Data was third in command of the Enterprise and was regularly the commanding officer on the bridge -- he absolutely gave orders to other officers. And on one occasion he was given temporary command of another ship where he had to dress down the first officer who was uncomfortable taking orders from an android.

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Jan 18, 2022·edited Jan 18, 2022

It's too bad the Pillar doesn't seem willing to really dig into the data regarding post-Vatican II mass attendance. There is a real story to be told there. For instance, if you compare working class Protestant church attendance and working class Catholic mass attendance, there was a massive fall off among Catholics a decade before Protestants. Currently, the rates for both are in the toilet, but working class Catholics appear to have been driven from church post Vatican II in ways Protestants weren't and still lag in that area relatively. Asking "Why?" would be a worthwhile endeavor, but I find Ed's utter dismissiveness of Evangelical growth in places like Brazil to be emblematic of a certain type of Catholic's unwillingness to even consider the possibility that Vatican II played a role in that. Evangelicalism isn't growing in South America primarily because of prosperity gospel preachers. Has Ed ever met a Protestant missionary to S. America? As a Catholic convert from Evangelical Protestantism, I've had many friends who fit that description: none of them were "prosperity gospel preachers." The choice in S. America isn't between Catholicism and a people who preach that holiness will make people rich. It is between a moribund faith where most people don't even show up for mass, let alone pray and read their Bibles and people who believe the faith is to be lived out in everyday life. The far more common choice in S. America is between a Marxist "Catholicism" that sees the Church primarily as an NGO and where bishops boast of having never baptized a native baby (yes, that really happened at the Amazon synod) and on the other side a Protestant faith where people really believe that what Jesus did on the cross will save their souls from hell if they believe and that faith in Christ is central to both life on earth and our eternal destiny.

If the Pillar wants to look into data to guide reporting, they cannot be so dismissive of data that doesn't agree with their priors. There are real stories to be told here. As examples of good journalism and data on this front, I would point to an article Matthew Schmitz did in February 2017 for the Catholic Herald called "A Beautiful Church for the Poor" and research such as Schwadel, McCarthy, and Nelson's "The Continuing Relevance of Family Income for Religious Participation: US White Catholic Church Attendance in the Late 20th Century." Even Rod Dreher's blog on Feb. 3, 2020 featuring Ryan Burges' research on church service attendance is more substantial that what I've found here.

As someone who grew up working class and now makes a living at a national lab looking at numbers every day, I take this subject very seriously. Vatican II, for instance, had a profound effect on Catholic life in ways that were different and distinguishable from the Protestant experience. A huge percentage of Evangelicals in America, for instance, are made up of ex-Catholics. Why is that and why are the vast majority of practicing conversions from Evangelical to Catholic among the college educated when marriage isn't involved? Why did the working class abandon Catholicism in droves post-Vatican II in ways not seen in the Protestant world? What was it about the new face of Catholicism that drove them out?

I know you guys are capable of better. That's why I'm a paid subscriber to the Pillar. Please, think about how you can approach this differently. If you want ideas, I know several devout engineers and physicists who have been reading on this topic for decades and would have ideas on interesting data to look at.

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Ed, you’ve always been my favorite. I pretty much always seem to be in agreement with your side of arguments, and you have been a clear voice of reason in the midst of so much media nonsense over the last two years.

So, it pains me to hear that you are more familiar with Star Wars than you are with Star Trek. Captain Picard was/is my favorite starship captain, and my favorite episode of all time is “The First Duty”.

https://youtu.be/xefh7W1nVo4

Good stuff.

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