Skeptical Faith

Google Image My four-year-old grandson, Leo, is crazy about the Disney movie, Encanto . It’s a musical about a family in Colombia whose on-and-off magical powers are not always helpful. Leo’s fascination doesn’t result solely from his love of music, the lovability of the movie’s characters and (except for the excessive length of some of the songs, in my opinion) the fact that it’s fast-moving. His “abuela,” my wife, Amparo, is Colombian and in Leo’s short life he’s heard a lot about the country and his Colombian cousins. One of the most interesting and popular songs from the movie is called “We Don’t Talk about Bruno.” The movie was released in 2021 and Newsweek declared that the “Bruno” song was “taking the world by storm,” reaching the number one spot on Billboard 100, the music industry’s list of top songs. Aren't Always Welcome The song is sung at a gathering of the Madrigal family, and family members explain to the principal character, Mirabel, why they don’t talk about...

Google Image Luke Olliff, a 30-year-old resident of Atlanta, says he and his wife gradually shed their religious affiliations  throughout their marriage. “My family thinks she convinced me to stop going to church and her family thinks I was the one who convinced her,” he said. “But really it was mutual. We moved to a city and talked a lot about how we came to see all of this negativity from people who were highly religious and increasingly didn’t want a part in it.” Olliff is quoted in an article entitled “Why Millennials Are Leaving the Church Behind” by Anastasiya Cernei of Missouri State University writing in the online site, Study Breaks. Tend to Be Negative Cernei writes that Olliff’s belief that highly religious people tend to be negative is shared by a whopping 57 percent of millennials, “who believe that religious people are generally less tolerant of other people.” Millennials, by the way, is the generation born between 1981 and 1996. They’re the demographic follow...

Google Image One of my favorite Simon and Garfunkel songs, “The Boxer,” was released in 1969. The last lines of the first verse go like this: Still a man hears what he wants to hear a nd disregards the rest. These lines are very similar to part of a lecture that, remarkably, I remember from one of my graduate-school classes in journalism/mass communication 50 years ago: that what you report is not necessarily what a reader understands, that a communicator must know his/her audience, and even then, the message you want to send may not be the one the recipient receives. In many cases, that’s due to selective perception – hearing or seeing what we want to hear or see. Virtually all of us, including believers, are affected by this human condition. Helps Determine Our Openness So, what’s this have to do with the search for God? It’s that we’re affected by selective perception on both sides of the “God, no-God” issue and regarding our views of religion in general. In other words, our...

Google Image I love to fish, but I don’t go as often as I’d like. In fact, when we lived in Iowa I hardly ever went, mostly because in the area where we lived, catching a “keeper” seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime event. And I was spoiled by great fishing in Alaska and Canada. But I’ve started fishing in a mountain stream only 45 minutes from our home, and though in two recent trips I’ve only caught one 13-inch rainbow trout, I plan to go fishing there as often as I can. Why? Because being surrounded by the most beautiful scenery in America is worth every minute of endless, seemingly useless casting and reeling. I understand that many people don’t get it. Why waste your time doing something so unproductive? You could be doing something important, or at least, something that is genuinely enjoyable. A Parallel It occurs to me that there’s a parallel to churchgoing. It’s no secret that church attendance, at least in the U.S., is down. Many people have stopped going, and that’s a tren...