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Entry: Theological Cannon Fodder Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/theological_cannon_fodder#18170 Post contents: Sid, "American religion (or religions) is just English religion of the 17th Century" It ainnot so! Read Bishop Jeremy Taylor's "Holy Living" and "Holy Dying." Those books were among the most popular manuals of religion in 17th-century England, selling about 60,000 copies each, and there is nothing in modern American religion -- Catholic or Protestant -- that comes even close to what they describe. The same applies to Catholicism. Read any of the late medieval or early modern confessors' manuals. Those manuals sold by the hundreds of thousands at the time, and the morals they described were applied to the general population by the confessors. Nothing in modern Catholicism comes even close to what you can find in those book. It is astonishing how much religions can change, while at the same time emphatically arguing that they are adhering to their original principles. This phenomenon may be relevant to the decline John complains about, because, counterintuitively, those religions that make the most demands of their members have persistently been be the ones that expand. (A possible explanation for religions' astonishing flexibility can be seen in John's reliance on what he calls "the virtue of prudence," which can rationalize away just about any moral command.) Sent at: 2009 01 08