When surveyed, almost all Americans say they believe in God, a majority say they pray and more than a third say they go to religious services every week.

But in a new book on religious trends in the United States, a Duke University professor says this picture of an unflinchingly faithful America is not quite accurate. At least when it comes to traditional religious practices, Americans' belief has faded in recent decades, says professor Mark Chaves.

Take the well-known fact that fewer Americans are joining the clergy. The Roman Catholic Church in the United States, for example, has experienced a sharp decline in priests.

Part of the reason, Chaves says, could be that Americans have lost respect for religious leaders. That's one of several findings in his book "American Religion: Contemporary Trends," which is being released Sunday.

...

"The American public has lost confidence in leaders of all sorts,” Chaves says. “But the loss of confidence in religious leaders has been more precipitous.”

Americans also have less interest in traditional religious practices than they once did, he adds. The percentage of Americans who attend church or other worship services has declined slightly over the past four decades, Chaves says.

Perhaps more striking is the evidence that many Americans exaggerate their church attendance. About 35 to 40 percent claim to attend church, but only 25 percent actually do. That's based on comparisons between the General Social Survey and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey, which ask, respectively, what Americans generally spend their time doing and what Americans actually spent their time doing on a specific day.

Chaves cites several reasons for this loss of faith in traditional religion, including the ongoing sex-abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, which first broke out in Boston in the early 2000s.

***************

Please click HERE to see the rest of the article, including a video about the "vocation crisis."

Please see "The Weakness of Institutionalized Religion" in The Urantia Book for some fresh insight on why the churches are in such severe decline, and what can be done...

Read more: http://www.truthbook.com/blogs/dsp_viewBlogEntry.cfm?blogentryID=1581

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites

CAPTION

By William Archie

That was one of five "unintended, unforeseen" consequences of 9/11, according to historian R. Scott Appleby of University of Notre Dame.

Reporting on the spiritual impact of 9/11 has given me the chance to talk longer with Appleby and with theologian and psychologist Fraser Watts who raises the provocative idea that religion can be "healthy or unhealthy.

....

Appleby, who co-chaired the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Task Force on Religion and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy, also directs "Contending Modernities," a program examining the interaction of Catholic, Muslim and secular forces in modern world.

His five points began with the tidal shift in views on religion in academia and politics. Following World War II the dominant view was that religion would inevitably give way to secularism, become privatized and be increasingly irrelevant in the public square. That "secular myopia" vanished "when 9/11 made it palpably clear that religion does matter in all these realms."

CAPTION

University of Notre Dame

• Religion is now being treated with more depth and sophistication -- by media, government and academia. There's new recognition that believers are "not all pathological or irrational or crazy. We see more nuance now. And we see that people are making a conscious and reasoned choices to hold on to faith.
• "Islam has been put in the spotlight" with consequences to the good, such as the Common Word document by Muslim scholars addressed to the Catholic Church, and to the bad, such as the "new McCarthyism" of fear and anger toward Muslims. Appleby cites new initiatives around the world in serious interfaith, interreligious dialogue and collaboration.
• There's a new interest in examining the structural and substantive ways that "healthy" religion is working in the world for promoting peace and social justice and defeating poverty and disease. The world's challenges have to be met collectively and cannot be resolved with the faith communities.

Fraser Watts, an Anglican priest, theologian and psychologist, centered his talk on the response to the terror attacks by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the global Anglican Communion.

CAPTION

2010 photo by Leon Neal, AFP/Getty Images

Williams later wrote that he wrestled with how to answer the theodicy question -- where was God when innocents died in his name? And his answer is very true to the Anglican tradition that does not see God intervening in human history.

Williams chooses to emphasize the presence of God in the sacrificial actions of first responders who "practice living in the face of death." This is a religiosity that doesn't recruit God to fix woes but rather sees God in how humans live with and through crises, says Watts.

The archbishop wrote that we all have to live with a "new kind of global vulnerability" and the experience can "open a door into the suffering of countless other innocents."

Says Watts, "Seen in this light, 9/11 is a spiritual and psychological challenge, as well as a political and military one. Living without defenses is always a challenge. Mature, healthy religion tries to rise to that challenge," so that a time of grief can point to a time of growth.

Read more: http://www.truthbook.com/blogs/dsp_viewBlogEntry.cfm?blogentryID=1582

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites

'When we have no experience of healthy spiritualities we are likely to opt instead for those that are morally dysfunctional.' Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA

The question: Is there a spiritual response to the riots?

The riots in London, the Midlands, Liverpool and Manchester have been analysed from just about every angle: the sociological, psychological, moral and even the aesthetic, but Russell Brand's Guardian article was a reminder of their underlying spiritual significance.

We say something is "spiritual" when it nourishes our sense of self and the self's sense of its own worth. The spiritual is made up of all those inner realities of conscience and imagination that lie beyond the rational and emotional sides of our nature. For example, deep-seated, life-shaping attitudes are not the products of reason or feeling: they are created by events and relationships functioning permanently deep within our lives.

...

The spiritual life of individuals and societies is built traditionally upon stories and rituals, teaching and example, discipline and prayer; but as the Christian basis of our culture has been largely abandoned, its place has not been taken by secular equivalents. Healthy spirituality is always creative; unhealthy spiritualities are invariably destructive. Religion might be only one spiritual resource among the many that we need, but without it we are on starvation rations.

The spiritual deficit in a multifaith society should concern unbelievers as well as believers. Christian humanists like myself should be in dialogue with secular humanists, as well as those of other faiths, for human nature is at root a spiritual nature. It should be well nourished among poor and wealthy alike. As WH Auden wrote, though alas in a line he came to regret: "We must love one another or die."

****************

Please click HERE to read the rest of the article

So, what IS spirituality? The Urantia Book gives us a lot of information - and a lot of hope in this area. Please see our Topical Study on Spirituality HERE. It is a good sampling of UB wisdom, and can be used as a springboard to explore the subject in depth.

Read more: http://www.truthbook.com/blogs/dsp_viewBlogEntry.cfm?blogentryID=1583

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites

(CNN) -- Most anyone you stop on the street knows something about post-traumatic stress disorder, also referred to as PTSD. But mention post-traumatic growth and you are more likely than not to be met with blank stares.

Post-traumatic growth -- the ability not only to bounce back from adversity but also to flourish -- is an ever-present theme in most of our epic tales and spiritual traditions. And science is finally catching up.

Researchers have discovered that the key to post-traumatic growth is resilience, and also that resilience is not just an advantage of a lucky few. "A lot of people erroneously believe that if you didn't get a good scramble of genes, resilience is not going to be your thing," says Dr. Karen Reivich, co-author of "The Resilience Factor." "But resilience is a set of skills that, with effort, anyone can develop. That's important because there is no magic pill here."

"How can I get this resilience training?" was the question I was most asked last week when I wrote about Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, the Army initiative to help soldiers build resilience and deal with high levels of sustained stress. Since Reivich also happens to be the research associate and primary trainer at the Penn Resiliency Project and the developer of the Army's Master Resilience Training course, I asked her to guide me through the basic steps to becoming more resilient.

According to Reivich, resilience is made up of six basic building blocks.

Become more optimistic

Increase mental agility

Seek self-awareness

Self-regulate

Focus on strengths

Develop better connections

*****************

Please click HERE to read the rest of the article: each of the suggestions it enlarged and explained in the article and worth a look...

For a Urantia Book perspective, please see our topical studies on

Adversity,

The Art of Living,

Failure,

Pain

Happiness

Read more: http://www.truthbook.com/blogs/dsp_viewBlogEntry.cfm?blogentryID=1584

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites

• Betty M. Bayer
  

  Betty M Bayer is professor and chair of Women’s Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.  She is currently working on a book in her field of psychology about the history of cognitive dissonance and its introduction in the study When Prophecy Fails, a work that reconsiders relations amongst religion, psychology and spirituality.  

• It’s been called the longest revolution, a social battle “fought and won with words,” one of the “great and substantial democratic movements,” and the living revolution of everyday life, here and now. This revolution is the women’s movement, the struggle for full equality, rights, and freedoms for women and all peoples.

  This Friday, August 26, is Women’s Equality Day, instituted by Congress in 1971 at the behest of Bella Abzug, one year after women set out in a nationwide strike for equality (“Don’t Iron While the Strike is Hot”) to mark 50 years since ratifying the 19th Amendment.

  What they protested was the continued lack of women’s rights fifty years after gaining the vote. By extension, this year Women’s Equality Day marks the seventy-two year campaign (launched 163 years ago on July 19-20th, 1848) at what is regarded by many in the U.S. as one of the earliest conventions calling for discussion of “the Social, Civil, and Religious Condition of Woman,” held in the Wesleyan Chapel of Seneca Falls, NY.

  The day also calls to attention 88 years of seeking the Equal Rights Amendment, first introduced by Alice Paul as the Lucretia Mott Amendment in July 1923, on both the 75th anniversary of the Declaration of Sentiments and the third anniversary of the 1920 victory for national suffrage on the steps of yet another Seneca Falls church: the First Presbyterian Church.

  ...
  

  Moving Time Backward?

  At the 163rd anniversary of the women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, Congressional Representatives Richard Hanna (R-NY) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) each addressed current brakes on justice and equality across race, sex, and sexuality. As Hanna noted, histories are woven and rewoven to open us to larger understandings of values and principles of a nation, of its history as one organized by movements for civil rights. The audience is reminded: The place of Seneca Falls and the significance of 1848 to this larger history of freedoms is to declare and declare ourselves again to advocacy, not to joining congress in what appears to be an effort, in Hanna’s words, to “move time backward” when it comes to women’s rights, reproductive rights and freedoms, race, and sexual equality.

  This history and these events bring the place of churches in civil rights history into sharp relief. Both the Wesleyan Chapel’s and the First Presbyterian Church’s histories were built on struggles for rights and freedoms; indeed, the First Presbyterian Church proudly announces itself as the site where Alice Paul first introduced an equal rights amendment, welcoming “all God’s people. The color of your skin, age, sexual orientation, economic class, or educational background does not matter to us. We understand that we are all children of God and God has blessed each of us with spiritual gifts.”

  That two religious institutions within minutes of one another see in their foundational histories the larger story of civil rights serves as a kind of aide-mémoire to both government and more general debate on relations between state and church on rights, equality, and freedom. What Hanna deemed congressional efforts to turn back the clock, Maloney made more concrete in those day-to-day losses women experience in business, law, economics, politics, medicine, gender pay differentials, and, one might well add, religion and academics (including offices of administration).
  

• ...
  

• Today, with another presidential election on the horizon, glaring omissions appear as well in critical debate and commentary on (religious) women in politics—such as that on Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.

  As one follows the path running alongside the water wall in Seneca Falls on which is inscribed the Declaration of Sentiments, one passes two blank slates before the Declaration and two after the list of signatories, open spaces, ones for the “matrix of the imagination” to inscribe the next chapter of women’s history writ large, a history that rolls down like justice and equality.

• ***************
  
• This is a lengthy article, full of history and interest. Please click HERE to read the entire piece.

Read more: http://www.truthbook.com/blogs/dsp_viewBlogEntry.cfm?blogentryID=1585

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites

Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ReligionNewsBlog/~3/XEo0vFuX6Ts/catholic-schools-in-kenya-prohibit-muslim-head-covering

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites

Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ReligionNewsBlog/~3/dFnCEMqCTWI/joint-task-force-polygamy-related-crime

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites

Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ReligionNewsBlog/~3/G-tGWOdOzIs/churches-in-nepal-live-under-threat-discrimination

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites

Can you remember those precious moments in your life when you felt so ecstatically whole and in balance that it brought tears to your eyes? The great poet Kabir once wrote:

"Between the conscious and unconscious, the mind has put up a swing; all earth creatures, even supernovas, sway between these two trees, and it never winds down. Angels, animals, humans, insects by the million, also the wheeling sun and moon; ages go by, and it goes on. Everything is swinging: heaven, earth, water, fire and the secret one is slowly growing a body. Kabir saw this for fifteen seconds, and it made him a servant for life."

At rare and precious times in each of our lives, we catch a glimpse of the exquisite balance we call "grace." If you are an athlete, you might describe this experience as being in "the zone." For others, such an event is regarded as a "peak experience." And for those with a more spiritual orientation, such rapturous moments of unity and wholeness may be reverently regarded as "moments of grace" or as "spontaneous communion with the sacred Source" -- by whatever name you call it. These are times when balance is realized in its fullness across all dimensions of our being.

Kabir saw this for fifteen seconds, and each of us in our own ways -- in the rare and precious moments in our lives -- have also caught a glimpse of unity and wholeness beyond description. In one of our favorite accounts, Mary Austin remembers:

"I must have been five or six when this experience happened to me. It was a summer morning, and the child I was had walked down through the orchard alone and come out on the brow of a sloping hill where there was grass and a wind blowing and one tall tree reaching into the infinite immensities of blueness. Quite suddenly, after a moment of quietness there, earth and sky and tree and wind-blown grass and the child in the midst of them came alive together with a pulsating light of consciousness. To this day I can recall the swift inclusive awareness of each for the whole -- I in them and they in me and all of us enclosed in a warm lucent bubble of livingness. I remember the child looking everywhere for the source of this happy wonder, and at last she questioned: 'God?' because that was the only awesome word she knew. And then, deep inside, like the murmurous ring of a bell, she heard the answer: God, God."

Can you remember a time when your tiny bubble of self cracked open, dissolved or expanded, when your inner and outer worlds touched, communicated and unified? Can you remember the exquisite moments of love, peace and wholeness, when boundaries dissolved, and you beheld yourself and your world as radiant and alive with a sacred Presence?

Remembering those moments of profound balance and grace in your life:

• What stands out to you when you recall them?
• What qualities of being were most alive for you then?
• What inner or outer factors seem to make you receptive to this sublime balance?
• What inner or outer factors seem to reduce your availability to such grace?
• How have these timeless moments lived on for you or influenced how you have chosen to live your life?
• How did those experiences influence how you relate to other people or other living creatures?

Grace is found in both intense peace and activity. Polls tell us that a third of us -- your friends, family and coworkers -- have had a profound or life-altering religious or mystical experience. In reality, this unnamable mystery is as close to us as water is to waves. Even if we don't talk about it, even if we don't have the vocabulary to discuss it, there have been moments in most of our lives when, for a timeless moment, the fabric of the story we tell ourselves dissolved to reveal that, in truth, we are both particle and wave, wave and ocean.

As Saul demonstrated on the road to Damascus, and as countless others have experienced giving birth, playing sports, in nature, in love, or driving down the road on the way to work, we are utterly unable to protect ourselves from spontaneous moments of grace.

*****************

Please click HERE to see the rest of this article

And see "The Supremacy of Religion" for a glimpse into the true source of some of these deeply spiritual experiences.

____________________

Read more: http://www.truthbook.com/blogs/dsp_viewBlogEntry.cfm?blogentryID=1576

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites

“I think I can, I think I can,” were the words that empowered the little train up that arduous hill. Mantras, affirmations, positive mental attitude training … as the world becomes busier and more complicated, it seems we humans are trying myriad techniques to keep ourselves calm and keep anxiety and depression at bay. Speakers, authors and life coaches everywhere are teaching us that much like “I think I can,” our thoughts and words create the life we have. So, when I landed on this Russian study exploring how words affect our DNA, I had to share it with you.

Click to enlarge

shutterstock.com

Only 10 percent of our DNA reportedly is used to build proteins, so Russian researchers joined linguists and geneticists in a study to find out more about what the other 90 percent was capable of. For me, their conclusions were mind-blowing. The original study, written in Russian and then detailed in a German book by Fosar, Grazyna, and Franz Bludorf, "Vernetzte Intelligenz: Die Natur Geht Online; Gruppenbewußtsein — Genetik — Gravitation," Aachen: Omega, 2006 print, has been translated for various publications. I was enamored and read all I could get my hands on. My favorite of which is found on Quantum Pranx.com.

Quantum Pranx says, “Our DNA is not only responsible for the construction of our body but also serves as data storage in communication. The Russian linguists found that the genetic code, especially in the apparently useless 90%, follows the same rules as all our human languages. To this end, they compared the rules of syntax (the way in which words are put together to form phrases and sentences), semantics (the study of meaning in language forms) and the basic rules of grammar.”

They determined that the functionality of our DNA has set rules just like our languages. So the language of all humans was not created by random occurrence — it is a reflection of our DNA. Their results suggest that your DNA can be “influenced and reprogrammed by words and frequencies.”

Pjotr Garjajev, a Russian biophysicist and molecular biologist (I bet he’s great at parties) and his crew explored the vibrational behavior of DNA. Their determination is that the basic structure of DNA and language are the same and that living tissue (not in vitro) will always react to language. This research offers an explanation as to why affirmations and words spoken out loud can have strong effects on our bodies. Spiritual teachers and sages have been teaching this for centuries — it is natural for our bodies to respond to language, words and thoughts.

****************

This is the first page of a two-page article. Please click HERE to see the entire piece..

Is what this article claims true? It has been my experience that the spoken word does have power...how about you? I am not aware of Urantia Book teachings that corroborate this finding, however. But we do have a topical study on language, which you might like to peruse...

On second thought, the Eternal Son is the actual "word" of God, so I guess language is pretty important after all...

Read more: http://www.truthbook.com/blogs/dsp_viewBlogEntry.cfm?blogentryID=1577

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites