From the Pew Forum. I take statistics with a grain of salt, but these benchmarks ought to be alarming.

Key Findings and Statistics on Religion in America

More than one-quarter of American adults (28%) have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion – or no religion at all. If change in affiliation from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44% of adults have either switched religious affiliation, moved from being unaffiliated with any religion to being affiliated with a particular faith, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.

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The Landscape Survey confirms that the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country; the number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51%. Moreover, the Protestant population is characterized by significant internal diversity and fragmentation, encompassing hundreds of different denominations loosely grouped around three fairly distinct religious traditions – evangelical Protestant churches (26.3% of the overall adult population), mainline Protestant churches (18.1%) and historically black Protestant churches (6.9%).

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Although there are about half as many Catholics in the U.S. as Protestants, the number of Catholics nearly rivals the number of members of evangelical Protestant churches and far exceeds the number of members of both mainline Protestant churches and historically black Protestant churches. The U.S. also includes a significant number of members of the third major branch of global Christianity – Orthodoxy – whose adherents now account for 0.6% of the U.S. adult population. American Christianity also includes sizeable numbers of Mormons (1.7% of the adult population), Jehovah’s Witnesses (0.7%) and other Christian groups (0.3%).

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G.K. Chesterton on fantasy writer and fairy-tale teller George MacDonald:

Dr. Macdonald, I fancy, has always known that melancholy is a frivolous thing compared with the seriousness of joy. Melancholy is negative and has to do with trivialities like death: joy is positive and has to answer for the renewal and perpetuation of being. Melancholy is irresponsible; it could watch the universe fall to pieces: joy is responsible and upholds the universe in the void of space. This conception of the vigilance of the universal Power fills all Dr. Macdonald’s novels with the unfathomable gravity of complete happiness, the gravity of a child at play (Quoted by Daniel Gabelman in George MacDonald: Divine Carelessness and Fairytale Levity).

This article by Timothy George (the founding dean of Beeson Divinity School) is about new biblical-theological commentaries, i.e., “the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Brazos Press); The Church’s Bible (Eerdmans); and two series in sequence from InterVarsity Press: the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture and the Reformation Commentary on Scripture,” and reading The Book of Acts with the Reformers. From the conclusion to the article:

The Book of Acts is the only New Testament writing that ends with an adverb: akolutos, “unhindered.” Paul’s evangelical odyssey has led him from Jerusalem to Rome. He is under house arrest, still in chains, but able to proclaim the Good News of God’s kingdom, “no man forbidding him” (KJV), “with all boldness and without hindrance” (NIV). This is the end of Acts, but not its conclusion. For, as Eugene Peterson has written: “The story of Jesus doesn’t end with Jesus. It continues in the lives of those who believe in him. The supernatural does not stop with Jesus. Luke makes it clear that these Christians he wrote about were no mere spectators of Jesus than Jesus was a spectator of God—they are in on the action of God, God acting in them, God living in them which also means, of course, in us.”

“We find the beating heart of Christian experience not in the church’s creed but in its music” (Bruce L. Shelley, Church History In Plain English, 117).

“Salvation for the early church was about more than going to heaven; it was about being united in communion with God. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit had to be divine to include us and make us ready to share in the already existing divine fellowship. We would not be made into God or equal to God, but we must be transformed to belong to the rich, eternal communion that awaits Christians. . . . Early Christians saw their destiny as being included into fellowship of the triune God” (Bruce L. Shelley, Church History In Plain English, 112).

“Thrift in thought will lead to the habit of writing, and any good man who writes a little every day will become a good writer. We grow by doing” (from Elbert Hubbard’s Let Thrift Be Your Ruling Habit).

An interesting article by Stephen H. Webb on Bob Dylan, the Book of Acts, Dylan’s 2012 interview for Rolling Stone, and Dylan’s song “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.”

“Should a family set their children at the feet of the wrong teachers, they will destroy the faith within a generation or two” (Kevin Swanson, Apostate: The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West, 6).

It sounds alarmist and hyperbolic, but it is true.

“We are on the cusp of the decentralization of information and media sources, and the gradual collapse of the brick-and-mortar university monopoly over Western thought and economics is already in process. The time has come to reform and rebuild the ideas and educational systems that make up the Western world” (Kevin Swanson, Apostate: The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West, 3).

“There must be communion and community among the people of God: not a false community, that is set up as though human community were an end in itself; but in the local church, in a mission, in a school, wherever it might be, there true fellowship must be evident as the outcome of original, individual salvation. This is the real Church of the Lord Jesus Christ–not merely organisation, but a group of people, individually the children of God, drawn together by the Holy Spirit for a particular task either in a local situation or over a wider area. The Church of the Lord Jesus should be a group of those who are redeemed and bound together on the basis of true doctrine. But subsequently they should show together a substantial ‘sociological healing’ of the breaches between men which have come about because of the results of man’s sin” (Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 153).

Schaeffer is arguing for a “visible quality” to the invisible church, i.e., “The final apologetic, along with the rational, logical defence and presentation, is what the world sees in the individual Christian and in our corporate relationships together” (152).