The Top 5: Dechurching and the poor, first time homebuying, low-income tax prep, summer camp, and praying for those who annoy you
Welcome to the latest edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation!
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The Top 5 articles for your week:
“The Great Dechurching Will Hurt Poor People” (Mere Orthodoxy)
Because Matthew Loftus recognizes a key outcome of the Great Dechurching.
As much as people like to denigrate “nominal Christianity,” you cannot deny that a nation full of people disconnected from a coherent moral community is worse off than one full of nominal Christians. There are a handful of people who can choose lives of generosity, kindness, and otherwise upright behavior without any religious instruction (although most of their moral beliefs are still deeply shaped by two millennia of Christianity.) These people who can go it alone are the exception, not the rule, and they’re more likely to have other material advantages that allow them to live ethically and pass their morals on to their children. Kichijiro was right (and even Richard Dawkins agrees): nominal belief is better than the alternatives. Spend any time with poor people, and you’ll see not only that churches and their ministries offer material goods that allow them to survive, but also that religious strictures help keep them from falling prey to destructive behaviors and ideas.
“Pray for Those Annoying People” (Plough)
Because William Law, a Church of England priest and writer born in 1686, has a short meditation on how to take up the discipline of praying for people you don’t like.
“Summer Camp and Parenting Panics” (New Yorker)
Because Jay Caspian Kang nails the intersection of parenting, the middle class, and modern life.
Summer-camp mania feels, instead, like a much more typical corrosion of modern life…we cannot stop sending our kids to them because we cannot conceive of an unscheduled moment. Nor can we explain why things have to be this way. This is just how kids grow up now, and we feel powerless to find an alternative…These are not the sorts of problems that elicit sympathy—we are, after all, talking about well-to-do parents with kids who will generally inherit their parents’ class privileges—but I do think they help to illuminate something about today’s seemingly unending parenting panics…In a not too distant past when more parents had faith in the inevitability of American progress, the push for class ascendancy might have felt a lot more reasonable, even rational. These days, though, we have been hit with a heavy dose of reality. We know that, even if we carefully manage our children’s economy of enrichments, they probably won’t end up at Harvard, anyway.
“The Rise of Poverty Inc” (The Atlantic)
Because Anne Kim explores the business boom around government-funded poverty programs.
Low-income tax prep is just one of many business models premised on benefiting indirectly from government anti-poverty spending. Some real-estate firms manage properties exclusively for tenants receiving federal housing subsidies. Specialty dental practices cater primarily to poor children on Medicaid.
“What does it take to buy a house? Increasingly, Mom and Dad.” (Washington Post)
Because Abha Bhattarai and Federica Cocco look at a rising trend in a deeply inaccessible market for first-time homebuyers.
ICYMI on the podcast
The Morning Five: May 28, 2024
The Morning Five: May 29, 2024