Eventually, Day’s Catholic Worker Movement would serve the poor in more than two hundred communities. Under her guidance, it would also develop a curiously dichotomous political agenda, taking prophetic stands against racial segregation, nuclear warfare, the draft, and armed conflict around the world, while opposing abortion, birth control, and the welfare state. That dichotomy seems especially stark today, when most people’s beliefs come more neatly packaged by partisan affiliation. But by the time she died, in 1980, Day had become one of the most prominent thinkers of the left and doers of the right. In her lifetime, it was the secularists—including Dwight Macdonald, in a two-part Profile published in this magazine, in 1952—who called Day a saint. Now, though, the cause of her sainthood is officially advancing within the Catholic Church, a development that has occasioned a new biography and a documentary, both of which explore the contentious question of who owns her legacy.
The United Methodist Church announced a proposal Friday to split the denomination over what it called "fundamental differences" regarding its beliefs on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ clergy.
Millennials have earned a reputation for reshaping industries and institutions — shaking up the workplace, transforming dating culture, and rethinking parenthood. They’ve also had a dramatic impact on American religious life. Four in ten millennials now say they are religiously unaffiliated, according to the Pew Research Center. In fact, millennials (those between the ages of 23 and 38) are now almost as likely to say they have no religion as they are to identify as Christian.
What I knew about the Amish before watching Fisher’s video — mostly gleaned from listening to “Weird Al” Yankovic — was pretty much limited to their plain dress, and the fact that most don’t use technology. Many of the videos tagged “Amish” on TikTok show horse and buggies — a hallmark of the culture to lay people — and are filmed by non-Amish passersby on their road trips through rural Pennsylvania. But then there are some Amish teens, bonnets and all, who are considered a hot commodity simply for existing on the platform. Social media offers them the same opportunity everyone has — to tell their stories on their own terms to people they don’t know. And yes, depending on their church and their age, it’s probably totally kosher for them to be on social media, if unusual.