Try is the opposite of hiding.
The fact that institutional churches have gone into decline doesn't mean that we're going to enter some purely secular age. Secular people need to be aware of that.
Many things about American life, that even secular people consider good, have flowed from the presence of a robust, resilient institutional Christianity.
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.
I read a lot of G. K. Chesterton. It was a fairly conventional intellectual path to the Catholic church, I would 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.
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.
There's never a benefit to bragging too much about a deal because the only sure thing is that I'm probably going to be dealing with that same general manager or that same person over and over again.
Every two to three weeks, I was changing around my room. My room was made out of nothing, basically - a magazine, a little radio, a little bed - and I had the sensibility to put things together and match things in a certain way so that they were very special.
Important safety tip - never look a vampire in the eye.
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.