The Top 5: From meaningful parenthood to entirely online churches
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 these articles, 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 Real Reason People Aren’t Having Kids” (The Atlantic)
Because Christine Emba explores what is preventing some people from becoming parents: meaning.
It’s a deceptively simple claim—and reinforces the notion that if people are going to have children, they need more than a hunch that human life is valuable. “It is not just the possibility of goodness but its actuality that fuels our deepest longing to ensure a human future,” Berg and Wiseman propose. And yet, we live in a time when even those who are certain about having kids are sometimes treated with skepticism. To proclaim that parenthood could be a positive experience is, in some circles, slightly gauche. “To assert the goodness of one’s own life,” the authors write, “is to risk coming across as privileged, or just hopelessly naive.”
“What adults lost when kids stopped playing in the street” (The Atlantic)
Because as a salient complement to Emba’s essay above, Stephanie H. Murray explores the effects of car dominance on children and child-rearing.
Suddenly, the modern approach to children’s play, in which parents shuttle their kids to playgrounds or other structured activities, seemed both needlessly extravagant and wholly insufficient. Kids didn’t need special equipment or lessons; they just needed to be less reliant on their time-strapped parents to get outside.
“My church is closing, and I don’t know what comes next — for me, or America” (Deseret News)
Because Ryan Burge talks about his experiences as a pastor who had to permanently close his church two weeks ago, while also presiding over a burgeoning vocation in which he collects data and explains declining American religiosity to the media and laypeople.
I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that I get asked all the time, by pastors, denominational leaders and interested observers, about ways to grow a church. I guess people assume that since I spend my days digging through religion data, that I should have been able to uncover the secret to getting people back into religion.
It takes everything in my power to not say to them, “My church went from 50 people to less than 10 under my watch. If I knew anything about how to grow a church I would have done it by now.” But I know where they are coming from because many of them are in the same boat that I was in.
“Can a Church Exist Exclusively on the Internet?” (Rest of World)
Because Vincent Owino investigates Kenya’s high rate of social media use and how some churches are planting their feet entirely online. The contents of this article complement the discussion in Burge’s essay above.
The difference with Wekesa’s church is that it exists only in the virtual realm. Its physical presence sits entirely within his apartment. He rarely meets a congregant in person. On this April night in Nairobi, after three hours of preaching, Wekesa culminates his session with a request for offerings. Audience members can send him funds through the mobile money platform M-Pesa, PayPal, or TikTok’s digital gifting option. In a given month, Wekesa makes between 100,000–300,000 Kenyan shillings ($786–$2,358) from donations, well above the average income in Kenya. “As I’ve spoken, so shall it be,” he concludes. “God bless you. I will see you again tomorrow, and your life will never be the same.” Then he clicks off the livestreams and the LED lights. For many Kenyan TikTok and Facebook users scrolling through their feeds, virtual preachers like Wekesa have become a familiar presence.
“Selfishness and Therapy Culture” (Freddie deBoer)
Because Freddie deBoer writes about how a recent article in the NYT spurred some of his thoughts on therapeutic culture, the concept of forgiveness, and the moral responsibility to one another rather than just to ourselves. We think this article is worthy of discussion, even if we don’t agree with his ultimate framing of forgiveness, especially because Christianity has a lot to offer this particular conversation.
Do you want to know what ideology is? What we mean when we say “ideology at its purest”? It’s not a collection of policy positions. It’s not a political party you vote for. It’s not even your conscious beliefs about right or wrong, your philosophy about how humans should act individually and collectively and the relationship between those acts and the public and private good. No, ideology refers to those beliefs you do not examine because you do not see them as beliefs at all. Ideology isn’t a matter of ingesting arguments about better or worse, right and wrong, and evaluating them to determine your own beliefs. Ideology is fundamentally the unexamined framework of the system through which you perform such an evaluation, the part you can’t and don’t see; it’s the assumptions that you cannot understand as assumptions. And the ideology that Carons demonstrates here, the set of assumptions she can’t begin to examine critically because she does not notice them, says that the individual has no responsibility to anyone but themselves. There is no moral duty, there is only the immediate emotional needs of the individual, which eclipses all other concerns, which is sacrosanct.
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