A Sound of Sheer Silence

The former is a recent, largely white, evangelical, American phenomenon with a dose of fundamentalism & a lot of weird cultural stuff & marketing thrown in. — Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) July 22, 2019 Of course, you can hate and reject both. That's cool. Just don't conflate them or write about them as the same thing. Or think they are theologically the same phenomena. — Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) July 22, 2019 I have seen a couple of people make a variation of Rev. Harrison Warren's argument on the Interwebs in the last couple of days.  It is prompted, in large measure, by the announcement that Joshua Harris, author of the evangelical purity culture ur-text I Kissed Dating Goodbye , is getting a divorce from his wife.  This is seen, not unreasonably, as symbolic of the moral and conceptual failure of the purity culture project, at least in its late 90s/early 00s presentation--the whole point of going through all of this purity cultur...

1. Last week, I went on a retreat with the CMMR .  We drove to Nazareth, Kentucky, to the mother-house of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth.  Nazareth, and that part of Kentucky generally, is a really interesting, and kinda strange, place.  The area was settled soon after the Revolutionary War by English Catholics from Maryland and some French Catholics fleeing Napoleon.  As a result, this area of north-central Kentucky (including the bigger towns of Bardstown and Elizabethtown) has this unusual Catholic through-line permeating what is otherwise the normal, rural American South. Likewise, the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth themselves were formed in the U.S. in 1812 to minister to this population, and other similar pockets of Catholics in the South and Midwest.  Thus, they are a uniquely and exclusively American expression of Catholicism.  Sure, they looked to European models for guidance (their rule is that of Vincent de Paul), but they are products...