The responses to this tweet are incredible.

It's important to work like Hell, to go places, and to read books. Young people haven't done those things.

Not sure it's an "honor," but it's a handsome effect.

(Isn't that the rule for h-words? "An" for Honor, but "a" for Handsome?)

(English be whack.)

Lost in translation:

https://twitter.com/WtfImgvids/status/1411450209914310661

Crid, regarding what I said a while back...

The Southern Baptist Convention, like other - but not all - religions, has been hemorrhaging, membership-wise, for years, so recruitment isn't working, and that just leaves reproduction.

It seems they've lost 2.3 million members since 2006.

https://religionnews.com/2021/05/21/southern-baptist-decline-continues-denomination-has-lost-more-than-2-million-members-since-2006/

And, I stumbled on this.

I have to admit that she's a good writer.

"Christianity’s Growth Problem Isn’t Politics, It’s Our Failure To Have And Evangelize Children"

By Joy Pullman (executive editor of The Federalist and mother of six)

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/15/christianitys-growth-problem-isnt-politics-its-our-failure-to-have-and-evangelize-children/

Excerpts:

...Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House” contains the marvelous Dickensian character Mrs. Jellyby. Mrs. Jellyby is obsessed with what she claims is self-sacrificially evangelizing children in Africa, while her own children live in squalor and lack an education. Her hyperopia bankrupts her husband and earns her children’s rightful contempt and rejection.

I see in Mrs. Jellyby a parallel to many of the evangelical institutions I have known. They spend so much time, money, and effort on what they claim is evangelization while the majority of children who attend their churches grow up and leave the faith.

Evangelicals have led campaigns to “bring prayer back to school” while doing nothing en masse when those campaigns failed. With some notable exceptions, top Christian leaders did nothing to ensure that as many Christian children as possible would receive a Christian K-12 education, abandoning our faith’s historic practice of doing so in wisdom vindicated by research showing that a secular education is the number one reason Americans lose their faith....

...Why is it that evangelicals constantly cite the Great Commission but not the original it echoes from Genesis, which commands people to “Be fruitful and multiply”? As my husband reminds me when I groan about being pregnant yet again, “multiply” encourages aiming for more than two kids...

...As Mary Eberstadt has documented, family disintegration and the failure of family formation are strongly linked to apostasy. If that is the case, then Christians need to be doing things like countering the cultural insistence that people wait until they are financially comfortable before starting a family and stay artificially infertile indefinitely to help that happen; making theologically robust Christian K-12 schools the top priority of evangelization efforts; and making it more institutionally possible for young people to get started in life without college loans.

It’s not clear how much American Christianity’s decline stems from unthinkingly accepting our culture’s antagonism to sexual fertility and our refusal to prioritize evangelism in the home, but it’s clear there’s a relationship between these that bears deep introspection.
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Btw, that second-to-last paragraph echoes what another columnist (N.C. Anglican) seems to think, though he's never said it in so many words. Namely, that it's somehow better to marry and even start a family when you aren't even 21 yet - and likely in debt - than to "live in sin" (that includes having sex with someone you aren't actually living with, of course) until you can actually AFFORD to accept the risk that your spouse could suddenly become an invalid and you'll become the sole support for a family of four. For about half of those born after 1990 or so, that means waiting until age 30 - or later.

Not to mention that the only people over 30, these days, who think a marriage at 20 isn't likely to fail are those who also believe in arranged marriages.

Lenona, the problem is too much 'God is Love' stuff. Priests love that bit. Love saying it over and over and lecturing endlessly on it. It is nonconfrontational and noncontroversial. No mess, no fuss, no complaints. And while no one is complaining they also don't come back. A weekly lecture about how god loves me and life is great isn't worth anything. I can go to Half Price Books and get the same thing from any insipid novel in the self help isle for a dollar. Worthless.

If what you quote is what the Southern Baptists actually think (and I don't know that it is) then nothing will change for them.

Btw, that second-to-last paragraph echoes what another columnist (N.C. Anglican) seems to think
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I just realized some might misunderstand that. He's an Anglican from North Carolina.