Christian Unity October Meeting

We will not be having our regular Christian unity meeting in October. Instead we are inviting interested participants to attend Harbor Springs Book Fair being held on October 1st at 7:00 PM at our local High School’s fine arts center. The featured speaker will be the forty year Religion editor of Newsweek magazine, Ken Woodward who will be discussing his book Getting Religion.
I am nearly half way finished with the Book and am impressed with the insights I have gotten from it as to how and why secularism has made such a big impact on our American culture. Woodward looks at all the significant events from the last half of the Twentieth Century to the present and describes the impact they have had on Religion. Most of those events lead to an undermining of religiosity for many individuals.
Within the Catholic Church he cited the Second Vatican Council and Poe Paul VI’s encyclical “Humanae Vitae” as straining, disrupting, and diminishing religious faith perspectives in the hearts of Catholics. The changes that resulted were dramatic as a consequence and reshaped the image and vision of Catholicism.
The Racial divide in our Nation that emerges during the 1960’s had a similar earth quacking of Social environment. Churches were in conflict within each other as they sought to grapple with the issues. Needless to say those wrestling’s also contributed to the fracturing of Religion’s influence on the American consciousness. Out of it emerged a new vision of American’s Social and political doctrine that was longed overdue and continues to be worked out.
Personal moral and ethical issues continue to erupt causing more social earthquakes that push and pull religious consciousness in many directions. All of these and those I have yet to read about in Woodward’s book have been the foundation for secularism that is becoming more a dominant consciousness for Americans.  The media are our new prophets and our electronic devices have become our new Bibles. These are my understandings of Ken Woodward’s Book on Getting Religion which is more of a history and an analysis of religious consciousness that makes us aware of how and why secularism is replacing religion and in the process of becoming a replacement for religion.
Hope you can make it to Woodward’s lecture on October 1st. We’ll talk about it at our next meeting on November 6th…