Faith, Fallout, and the Future: Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction in the Early Postwar Era

In the early postwar era, from 1945 to 1960, Americans confronted a dilemma that had never been faced before. In the new atomic age, which opened with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945, they now had to grapple with maintaining their faith in a peaceful and prosperous future while also controlling their fear of an apocalyptic future resulting from an atomic war. Americans’ subsequent search for reassurance translated into a dramatic increase in church membership and the rise of the evangelical movement. Yet, their fear of an atomic war with the Soviet Union and possible nuclear apocalypse did not abate. This article discusses how six post-apocalyptic science fiction novels dealt with this dilemma and presented their visions of the future; more important, it argues that these novels not only reflect the views of many Americans in the early Cold War era, but also provide relevant insights into the role of religion during these complex and controversial years to reframe the belief that an apocalypse was inevitable.

Forms of Parental Involvement in the Spiritual Development of Children: Lessons from Grace Community Christian Ministries Church in Kitengela.

The paper focuses on the forms through which parents are involved in developing the spiritual welfare of their children. The study utilised a case study design to focus on Grace Community Christian Ministries Church (GCCM) in Kitengela. Data collection methods involved the use of interviews. A small group of nine parents - participants - from GCCM church membership was selected. The collected data was further analyzed thematically. The following themes were generated: teaching, Bible stories, family activities, prayer, modelling, Church attendance, choice of school, exhaustion and lack of time, lack of support from spouse, inexperience and, information gap. It was revealed that some of the ways parents got involved in nurturing their children spiritually included: teaching, Bible stories, family activities, prayer, modelling, Church attendance and choice of school for the children. However, the most common methods used were Church attendance and Sunday school. The paper thus recommends that GCCM church should train parents on how to empower their children spiritually at home so that they do not only rely on the activities in Sunday school.

Back to Church

It is not possible directly to connect Mead’s return to Manus in 1953 with her return to church in 1955. She was, however, exposed to a particularly vibrant form of Christianity there, one that propelled rather than impeded social change. During the past decade, she had grown frustrated with American churches that she saw as divisive, harboring racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-scientific attitudes, but in Manus she saw the power of institutional religion in a new way. Maybe American Christianity could be a vehicle for her moral vision. Her perspective on Christian missions also shifted considerably. Not long after her trip, she renewed her church membership, and soon after that she got deeply involved in church work. She would not say that she recovered her faith, because she insisted that she never lost it. Still, something came into focus for her in the mid-1950s that had been blurry for many years, and her still-boundless energies found new, and more explicitly churchly, directions.

The Extremities of Defending Liberty

This chapter talks about Barry Goldwater, who regarded William E. Miller's church membership as an asset rather than a liability when he chose him as his running mate in the 1964 presidential election. It describes Miller as the grandson of German American immigrants and reared in the Roman Catholic Church. It also covers Conscience of a Conservative as the ghostwritten product of L. Brent Bozell, which identified Goldwater with the conservative movement and challenged the GOP's East Coast establishment. The chapter notes how Bozell grew up in Nebraska as nominal Protestant then converted to Roman Catholicism before enrolling at Yale University. It discusses how local circumstances, such as national origin and personal convictions, did more to color perceptions of politics than the church's social teaching.

Participation in Divine Light and Church Membership in De Spiritu Sancto of Basil of Caesarea

The imagery of light plays a key role in Basil of Caesarea’s narrative of God and salvation. Curiously, the communal aspects of this imagery have received little attention in scholarship. A systematic analysis of “De Spiritu Sancto” reveals that in Basil’s understanding, participation in divine light functions as a parallel concept to Church membership. To begin with, the corporate nature of participation in divine light is evident from the ecclesial rites of initiation whereby this participation is bestowed. Furthermore, Basil uses the imagery of light to underscore the corporate nature of both the mystical union between God and the baptized, and the outward expressions of the believers’ lives in the divine light: worship and public witness. In addition to shedding new light on the Basilian notion of Church membership, the study o#ers a fresh outlook into the ecumenical dialogue between the Orthodox Church and Lutheran Church bodies on the theology of initiation.

Religion and the Transmission of COVID-19 in The Netherlands

The aim of this study was to find out if the typical spread of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 in The Netherlands, with significantly higher levels in the Dutch Bible belt and the southern, traditionally Catholic provinces, is related to the specific religious composition of the country. To do this, government statistics regarding the level of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 per municipality were combined with statistics regarding church attendance and church membership rates. Results showed that in the Dutch Bible belt the level of patients with COVID-19 was strongly related to church attendance, but in the southern, traditionally Catholic part of The Netherlands nominal church membership mattered more than church attendance. On the basis of these findings, the conclusion was drawn that religion probably facilitates the spread of the virus in both a direct and indirect way. It facilitates the spread of the virus directly through worship services but also indirectly by way of endorsing more general cultural festivities like carnival and maybe even by strengthening certain non-religious social bonds. Epidemiologists monitoring the spread of the virus are called upon to focus more on these possible indirect or latent effects of religion.

Introduction

This introduction develops a theoretical framework capable of explaining both the rise of white Protestant social concern in the latter part of the nineteenth century and its sudden demise at the end of the twentieth. The theory proceeds from the premise that religious conviction, by itself, is rarely sufficient to motivate empathetic political behavior. When believers do act empathetically—for example, by championing reforms that transfer resources or political influence to less privileged groups within society—it is typically because strong religious institutions have compelled them to do so. For much of American history, the socioeconomic significance of church membership, coupled with a robust network of ecumenical institutions, endowed mainline Protestant leaders with considerable authority over the beliefs and actions of their congregations. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, the collapse of mainline Protestant authority fueled the rise of an evangelical movement whose leaders were incentivized to echo the increasingly conservative political convictions of the broader white electorate.

A Comparison of Religiosity and Life Satisfaction among Seven Different Religious Groups

The purpose of this study is to see if six widely used indicators of religiosity (self-reporting as being religious; importance of their religion to them; church membership, attendance and belonging to church groups; and praying) are related to happiness and life satisfaction. Using an on-line survey (N = 1399) I found that all except the frequency of prayer indicator were positively associated with life satisfaction and happiness. The sample was then broken into seven groups: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Unitarian, Unity and no religion. Significant ANOVAs were found among the groups on each of my four questions: Life Satisfaction, Happiness, Not Feeling Lonely, and Group Satisfaction. Overall, Unity members scored high on these questions while the non-religious, Buddhists, and Unitarians scored low. The results for Unity, Unitarianism and Buddhism were discussed in terms of their doctrines accounting for these scores. Finally, recommendations were made for future research.