"I went to a science magnet high school, graduating in 2001, but in my
late 20s, I began to notice that some of my classmates were turning
toward the Catholic faith. It surprised me: My high school was
ostentatiously secular. We had a steel statue on the front lawn
depicting the triumph of mathematical logic. Our senior class president
wore a giant calculator costume to football games. When my government
class held a mock debate over abortion, only two students out of 18
volunteered to argue the 'pro-life' case.
"And near the end of the 2000s, a half-dozen old friends I'd
remembered as logical skeptics and trend-forward internet connoisseurs
had become deeply religious. Some of them had been raised loosely
Catholic, some had not. They blogged. They wrote Facebook posts about
their conversions and shared memes about contraception-free family
planning. They seemed to want to celebrate their lives. . . . .
"These people intrigued me, because they didn't quite fit. The
presumption, I had always thought, was that the U.S. is on a steady, if
bumpy, progressive drift. Books published about America's demographic
destiny like to warn religious folks to be afraid of the young. Each
successive generation, the thinking goes, wants to exercise more choice
over what they eat, over how they live, over who they love, over their
dreams, over their truths. The young aren't interested in tradition or
moral constraints.
"Catholicism seems especially out of step with contemporary American life. . . .
"But right around the time I began to notice my high school classmates'
burgeoning faith, something flipped. After 50 years of decline, the
number of young women 'discerning the religious life' - or going through
the long process of becoming a Catholic sister - is substantially
increasing. In 2017, 13 percent of women from age 18 to 35 who answered a Georgetown
University-affiliated survey of American Catholics reported that they
had considered becoming a Catholic sister. That's more than 900,000
young women, enough to repopulate the corps of 'women religious' in a
couple of decades, even if only a fraction of them actually go through
with it."
A recent Huffington Post article reported on the trend of more and more young women being called to the religious life ("after 50 straight years of decline").
To access the complete article, please visit:
HuffPost: Highline: Behold, The Millennial Nuns (11 JUL 19)
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