In the end, you do need institutions to transmit the faith for the long haul. That's why I … - Ross Douthat

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I think it's important for us to allow ourselves to be in creative bubble when you really need to finish something. You can always re enter the world after, once you feel like you're done with it.

Ross Douthat

In the end, you do need institutions to transmit the faith for the long haul. That's why I make the case that, in certain ways, American Protestants could stand to recover the denominationalism that they've left behind over the last 50 years. They are real values in having a confessional tradition that can sustain your faith over the long term.

Case, Long, Real, Transmit, Years

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Many things about American life, that even secular people consider good, have flowed from the presence of a robust, resilient institutional Christianity.

American, Christianity, Flowed, People, Resilient, Robust

Institutional Christianity has had clear secular benefits to American life for hundreds of years. It's played both a prophetic role in terms of generating moral critiques of American excesses, and so on, and also a communal role, in terms of building community as the country moved westward to the role my own Catholic Church played in assimilating generations of immigrants.

Benefits, Community, Country, Life, Secular, Years

I read a lot of G. K. Chesterton. It was a fairly conventional intellectual path to the Catholic church, I would say.

Catholic, Church, Conventional, Intellectual, Path, Say

My mother converted when I was 16. She was the driving force behind religion in our family. So, I'm sure I was heavily influenced by that. But, I also was, and still am, convinced by the Catholic churches historical claims to represent the continuity with the early Church that other forms of Western Christianity lack.

Catholic, Convinced, Heavily, Historical, Mother

Americans are an "almost chosen people," which is meant to suggest that there are clear parallels, literal, theological and everything else, between the American story and the Old Testament story of Israel and then the broader story of the Christian church. It's OK to recognize the parallels. It's OK to invoke them. But, you have to keep that "almost" in front of the "chosen. " You can't go all the way and say, "America is Israel, America is the Church. " That's where I think patriotism shades into, what I call, the heresy of nationalism.

America, Chosen, Christian, Old, Testament, Thinking