Word: unbeliefs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...institution that seemed to be dying in the face of secular criticism. Last week Pusey returned to the school for a convocation speech on its 150th anniversary at a time when the quality of its students and faculty has never been higher. Yet, Pusey noted sadly, "the world of unbelief is all about us," and doubts about the school's role seem to be rising with "increased poignancy, in new and awful forms...
Pusey said that the great majority of men and women still want to believe in something worthy of belief, but that our intellectual climate is be- coming one of "self-destructive unbelief." He suggested that men could justifiably reject past formulations of faith, but he feared the spread of the belief that the Christian faith has no relevance to modern culture...
Donald Thorman, publisher of Kansas City's yeasty National Catholic Reporter, sums up this attitude of selective faith and dogmatic iconoclasm as an "age of unbelief that has finally begun to hit the church in America." Somewhat gloomily, Thorman foresees the possibility of an era of what he calls "Uncatholicism, in which large numbers of the faithful will live their religious lives apart from official Catholicism-not fully leaving the church, but not really participating in its life either." Chicago's priest-sociologist, Father Andrew Greeley, co-author of a major study of religious attitudes in parochial schools...
...says one such politely indifferent atheist, Dr. Claude Lévi-Strauss, professor of social anthropology at the Collège de France. "I find it's perfectly possible to spend my life knowing that we will never explain the universe." Jesuit Theologian John Courtney Murray points to another variety of unbelief: the atheism of distraction, people who are just "too damn busy" to worry about...
...could be a necessary and healthy antidote to centuries in which faith was too con fident and sure. Perhaps today, the Christian can do no better than echo the prayer of the worried father who pleaded with Christ to heal his spirit-possessed son: "I believe; help my unbelief...