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When the Pew Research Center conducted its most recent Religious Landscape Study back in 2014, it found that while 76% of adults in the Chicago metro area considered religion at least somewhat important in their lives, only 29% reported attending a religious service at least once a week.

Pew discovered that while the percentages of adults who say they believe in God, pray daily, and attend religious services regularly declined only modestly in recent years, this modest decline was driven significantly by the nones.

The nones are the growing minority of Americans, particularly in the Millennial generation, who say they do not belong to any organized faith.

The nones accounted for 23% of the adult population in the U.S. in 2014, up from 16% in 2007, according to Pew.

And, as the nones have grown in size, they also have become even less observant than they were when the original Religious Landscape Study was conducted in 2007, Pew officials wrote. The growth of the nones as a share of the population, coupled with their declining levels of religious observance, is tugging down the nations overall rates of religious belief and practice.

That decline in religious observance has meant a shift in the Catholic landscape in Oak Park, with all four of the villages parishes undergoing readjustments meant to confront declining church attendance and the many challenges that decline brings.

I approach this social reality from the standpoint of the narrator in Philip Larkins 1954 poem Church Going, who can never resist the impulse to stop inside of an empty house of worship and wonder when churches will fall completely out of use, what we shall turn them into.

When churches become obsolete, we should all worry regardless of what, or whether, we believe. Thats because religious spaces (and Ill reference the Christian church, in particular, since thats the one Im most familiar with) are actually important binding agents in the civic glue that holds together our secular society. At their best, churches, the Black church in particular, helped build American democracy.

As the political scientist Robert D. Putnam wrote 20 years ago in his famous book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, churches are one of those places that help build social capital, which Putnam defines as the connections among individuals social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them.

In Change: How to Make Big Things Happen, the communications scholar Damon Centola disputes some of the received opinions weve come to have about social networks in the age of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. While social networking is dominant, actual social networks are fraying.

As Centola writes, social networks are basically the totality of peoples relationships, which may and may not be (more likely not) the same as Facebook friendships.

Networks include everyone we talk to, collaborate with, live near, and seek out, Centola writes. Our personal network makes up our social world.

If we want to do more than make a dance go viral on TikTok, if we want to create a movement to protect voting rights, for instance, we need to rely on what Centola calls strong-tie networks, as opposed to weak-tie networks.

The geometry of weak-tie networks looks a lot like a fireworks display, the author writes. Each person is at the epicenter of their own explosion, and their weak ties reach out randomly in every direction. Each tie jumps to a different, sometimes faraway place. There is very little social redundancy in weak ties. These people tend not to be connected to one anothers friends.

The geometry of strong-tie networks looks more like a fishing net, he adds. These networks have the appearance of an interlocking sequence of triangles and rectangles. This pattern, often referred to as network clustering, is distinctive for its abundance of social redundancy. People are connected to one anothers friends.

The Black church, working in tandem with other civic binding agents like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) are what created the strong-tie networks responsible for the Civil Rights Movement.

Rosa Parks was effective because she was not alone, Centola writes, echoing Putnam. She was part of a massive social network of citizens who coordinated their efforts to protest segregation in the American South.

For instance, before she became famous for sitting on a bus (an act that ultimately paved the way for the massive misconception of Parks as a mere domestic servant with tired feet who was passively foisted into history), she was one of the NAACPs best sexual assault investigators.

Twelve years before the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, Parks worked to investigate instances of Black men falsely accused of rape a common pretext for lynching and Black people sexually assaulted by whites.

The historian Danielle L. McGuire documents this overlooked aspect of Parks biography in At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power.

Too often, when we learn about historical figures and successful people, their social networks get obscured. We tend to see them as if they sprang fully formed into the world. But this isnt how change works in reality, Centola argues.

Social networks are the coordinating sinews that allow large numbers of regular people from many different walks of life to act together, he writes. When people act as a coordinated whole, then any one persons action that of Rosa Parks, for example carries with it a mass of anonymous people. That is how revolutions are sparked.

So, as Centola explains, if we want to see how change really works, the first step is to stop looking for the special people in the network and instead start looking for the special places.

Places like Holt Street Baptist Church, where King and other local leaders at the time met to strategize and stage the Montgomery bus boycott. Today the historic church, sadly, sits abandoned.

When I think of our present crisis of churchgoing, I think of my own church, a Baptist congregation in Maywood going through its own challenges.

Like the Catholic parishes in Oak Park, membership is down. Our pastor of some five decades died a few years ago. Next weekend, well be tasked with selecting his permanent successor. I dont attend services very regularly, so Ive decided to recuse myself from the voting (well pick one candidate among five finalists).

I still, however, consider myself a member. This church, after all, was where I grew up, was nurtured, and where I developed.

Sundays were a production, from morning until late in the evening, when Id often fall asleep on the pews, often under the sound of relatives preaching (my grandfather, stepfather, grandmother and a great-aunt were all ministers, assigned based on a rotating schedule, to deliver a sermonette on any given evening).

Before those late-night Vespers services, as they were called, a small group of us would gather for what was called Baptist Training Union or BTU, for short. This was roughly an hour in a room picking through Bible scriptures before convening to sing hymns and share testimonies.

The experience, much like Sunday school some 10 hours earlier, has stayed with me. I realize now that it helped build character, provided reading and comprehension lessons, and wove around me a strong-tie network that I dont think I could have gotten anywhere else.

One of my Sunday school teachers was Don Williams, who was also a minister at my church. Williams, the father of Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough, was the second Black mayor of Maywood (Maywoods first Black mayor, Joe Freelon, was the longtime chairman of our churchs deacon board).

Williams was also once the leader of the Maywood branch of the NAACP, where he discovered a bright, charming and enthusiastic young student-leader and decided to appoint the teenage boy to be the civil rights organizations local youth leader. That boy was Fred Hampton.

Various institutional nodes, whether churches or civic organizations like the NAACP, often interconnect, creating amplifying effects. Don Williams, Joe Freelon, Fred Hampton. I feel their cumulative influence intimately within me and that sense of history and tradition feeds my own sense of purpose.

Its a powerful thing knowing that you arent alone in the world, that youre part of a community of people who have been before you; who live, struggle and have their being beside you; and who will come after you.

What happens, as Larkin asked many years ago, when these binding institutions wither and die (a shape less recognizable each week, a purpose more obscure)?

I trust Larkins answer. Humans will be compelled to recreate them, since someone will forever be surprising a hunger in himself to be more serious.

Whether or not its possible, in our lonely TikTok and Twitter age, to create alternative institutions that are as effective at weaving social networks strong enough to spark the moral revolutions the world desperately needs right now is another question.

CONTACT: michael@oakpark.com

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On the secular importance of churchgoing - Austin Weekly News

by Martha Bartlett Piland

Dont make the mistake of trying to shoehorn this audience into current product offerings, visuals and messaging. It wont appeal and it wont work. Millennials (born between 1980-1996) have very different attitudes about your banks offeringsif theyre even aware of them at all.

Add that to the growth of online-only banks, DIY online tools and a post-COVID world, bankers must innovate to capture a share of this highly important audience and the newfound wealth they will need help managing.

This generation is hungry for education. Many think wealth management is out of reach. Their relationships and values matter. And they ask their parents for advice.

Lets look at what each of these means when it comes to wealth management:

Theyre hungry for education. Millennials want to be more prepared for their financial futures, but many are only partially managing their current financial conditions. Theyre looking for ways to save money, pay off debts and get ahead, but theyre not well equipped for making decisions or being proactive about long term planning.

Many feel like theyre going it alone. Theyre hungry for education around their current financial statelet alone the future. They scour social media for intel and look to strangers for information. They are also acutely aware that they need to know more. A recurring theme is that they dont want to be judged for not knowing things.

James Notzon, global wealth SVP and director of wealth management in the Texas border region for BBVA, says his bank is very aware that millennials will inherit a lot of wealth and they need to know much more about how to handle it. Millennials have more access to information than I ever did at their age, he says Theyre attuned to how much theyre saving. Theyre informed on that.

While millennials know what theyre saving, Notzon says most are not fully financially literate. He says they are constantly on social media looking for information and like to DIY it, trying to make value judgments. The mix of options available to them is huge. More options take more time and experience to research and understand. Its overwhelming and can result in reckless gambles.

The takeaways: Providing valuable information and building trusted relationships means positioning the bank as a valued authority as customers needs and assets grow. There is value in providing educational workshops and events, regular digital delivery of advice and frequent social media posts on these topics to position the bank as a welcoming, non-judgmental resource. Building a community of millennial investors who feel smart, included and valued is essential. Your bank will be stickier and grow as customers bring their friends.

Many millennials think professional wealth management help would be valuable, but think its out of reach, or for other people, not for me. They say they should get around to it and would like to have it, yet many think its too expensive.

Notzon says many millennials are investing more than banker peers may realize because its so easy to open a self-serve investment account online. Traditional banks are often not even on their radar as a place to go for advice and investing.

These perceptions should come as no surprise to marketers. Many bank websites and in-lobby communications perpetuate this mindset with language like high-net-worth individuals and showing gray-haired clients taking cruises and riding motorcycles across the country. Thats not what they are. (Yet.)

High-net-worth clients have the assets that pay for the service your institution provides. Customers in a lower bracket can seem expensive to attract and serve. But there is value in the long view: The value of the client over time will far outweigh the initial acquisition and early-stage costs.

The takeaways: First, get on their radar. They need to be aware your bank offers wealth management for them. Next, develop marketing messages, graphics and digital communications channels that are relevant to the millennial audience.

Products, servicessolutions, reallyshould also be suited to them. Technology makes it easy to showcase wealth management offerings designed for them. The offerings their parents and grandparents embrace probably dont resonate with millennials.

Many country clubs and philanthropic leadership circles offer a junior membership to people under 40 with special benefits. Innovate your offerings with inspiration from other sectors that are successful in captivating this audience.

Relationships and values matter. Online self-service investment products and apps cant compete with a personal relationship. Millennials want advisors who share their values or who understand their life goals and experiences. Doing business with bankers who get them will engender trust and solidify these budding relationships.

I specifically signed up with my advisor because she was clear that she prioritized teaching financial wellness to single women, says a member of the Banktastic National Millennial Advisory Board in a recent study. Others mentioned experience with trusts for disabled dependents, understanding LGBTQ and environmental views as very important.

Another board member says: I enjoy talking with my financial adviser, who has similar interests. They are helpful in bouncing ideas and strategies to get to me where I want to be.

What does the wealth management team look like in your bank? Diversity of age, gender and ethnicity makes a difference, too. Recruiting and retaining people relatable to the desired millennial audiences will also make your offerings more attractive.

The takeaways: Professional training and growth for your more seasoned wealth management and trust officers will be essential. They need to be ready to answer millennial customer concerns about matters very different than those of previous generations. Hiring and mentoring younger advisors who are relatable and proficient also sets you up for success.

Be ready to showcase your investment advisers and trust officers with these areas of interest and expertise in your banks advertising, website and social media. Make sure these personnel are also networkingboth in person and on social mediain the places where they can talk to people about this important work. Social word of mouth will be powerful marketing.

They ask their parents for advice. Parents and grandparents have enjoyed longtime trusted relationships with their banks wealth management and trust departments. Those same parents probably have not yet shared much information with their children about these matters. From a marketing perspective, this should be viewed as a built-in referral source. Engaging their offspring sooner lessens the likelihood of losing the relationships when wealth transfers happen.

Notzon recommends getting families in the same room and discussing their wishes together. In my space, its not just the relationship with those who control the wealth, he says. We like to have at least one family meeting per year with all the family together. Notzon says its important to ensure parents wishes and goals are met, while giving sound education and informationbut only as much as the parents want to share.

He also cautions that family meetings will require diplomacy and care. There are many more blended families these days, so family meetings can be tricky to navigate. But with this added nuance, the meetings are even more important.

Key takeaways: Creating family-related referral outreach, seminars, marketing pieces and educational web and social media content gives your bank the opportunity to build awareness and interest from millennials. Generating family-centered conversations about wealth management and trust services could also spur additional needs from parents and grandparents. Crafted carefully, its win-win-win.

The time is now. In less than 10 years, your most valuable audiences will look very different than they do today. To be well positioned for this seismic shift, its essential to start evolving and marketing to this generation immediately.

Martha Bartlett Piland is president and CEO of Banktastic, a branding firm that helps financial organizations build love and loyalty, and offers a special focus on millennial customers.Her second book, Beyond Sticky, is available at all major booksellers.

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The Millennial Wealth Management Key: The Value of Relationships | ABA Banking Journal - ABA Banking Journal

Reddit's volunteer moderators have shared an open letter demanding the company ban subreddits dedicated to spreading COVID-19 misinformation. In response, Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman released the tech bro statement equivalent of a shrug emoji.

Posted Wednesday on subreddit r/vaxxhappened, the moderators' open letter calls Reddit out for allowing dangerous COVID-19 misinformation to thrive on its platform largely unchecked.

"It is clear that even after promising to tackle the problem of misinformation on this site, nothing of substance has been done aside from quarantining a medium sized subreddit, which barely reduces traffic and does little to stop misinformation," the post read (emphasis in the original).

Among the signatories are the moderators for subreddits r/aww, r/dataisbeautiful, r/EarthPorn, r/Futurology, r/lifeprotips, r/pics, r/showerthoughts, r/tifu, and r/UpliftingNews, all of which have over 10 million subscribers each.

Reputable health officials have continually stressed the importance of wearing a face mask amidst the coronavirus pandemic, as well as maintaining a safe distance from others and getting vaccinated as soon as possible. These are all scientifically proven strategies that literally save lives. Unfortunately, social networking platforms such as Reddit continue to host rhetoric rejecting such measures, allowing coronavirus misinformation to spread, multiply, and actively endanger people.

"The main problem with a concerted disinformation campaign is that such a message attains an air of legitimacy through sheer volume of repetition," read the moderators' letter. "There can be no room for leniency when people are dying as a result of misinformation on this platform. Reddit as a global platform needs to take responsibility here.

"We are calling on the admins to take ownership of their website, and remove dangerous medical disinformation that is endangering lives and contributing to the existence of this ongoing pandemic. Subreddits which exist solely to spread medical disinformation and undermine efforts to combat the global pandemic should be banned."

It's an understandable request. If people are spreading falsehoods that are proven to directly result in serious illness and death, and you could limit their reach, basic decency demands that you'd do everything in your power to do so.

So, of course, Reddit has shrugged and declared the whole thing not their problem, because self-regulation has worked out so well thus far.

"While we appreciate the sentiment of those demanding that we ban more communities that challenge consensus views on the pandemic, we continue to believe in the good of our communities and hope that we collectively approach the challenges of the pandemic with empathy, compassion, and a willingness to understand what others are going through, even when their viewpoint on the pandemic is different from yours," wrote the company's CEO Huffman in Reddit's r/announcements subreddit.

Apparently, as someone choosing to "continue to believe in the good of our communities," Huffman appears to have never used the internet.

Huffman blamed evolving CDC advice for Reddit's lacklustre policy, as though the contested content were just confusion-fuelled debates on what type of mask we should wear rather than rejection of masks altogether. He also stated that Reddit will take action against communities that violate the website's rules such as "encouraging harm (e.g. consuming bleach)," and offered the consolation that they'll continue quarantining subreddits.

Quarantined subreddits have warnings that they could contain misinformation, are excluded from search results, and don't appear in non-subscription feeds such as Reddit's Popular posts. But Reddit has already been doing that for months the whole point of the moderators' open letter is that it simply isn't enough.

Spreading anti-mask, anti-vaccination rhetoric actively encourages harm, especially considering COVID-19 is still killing thousands of people every day in the U.S. alone. But it seems Reddit believes this harm isn't serious enough to warrant harsher action.

Reddit's empty platitudes and clear abdication of responsibility are disappointing, but not all that surprising. After all, it's much easier to step back and pretend you and your $10 billion company have absolutely no culpability in the 625,000 people in the U.S. who have died from COVID-19 to date.

When reached by Mashable for comment, a Reddit spokesperson reiterated that its self-regulation policy is a good thing, actually.

"Reddit is a place for open and authentic discussion and debate," said the spokesperson. "This includes conversations that question or disagree with popular consensus. We provide users with authoritative resources when viewing communities that may warrant additional scrutiny, and continue to action content and users that violate our policies.

"Throughout the pandemic, we have also provided COVID-related resources to support our volunteer moderators, users, and communities, including a dedicated AMA series connecting users with authoritative experts on coronavirus and vaccines, as well as deploying homepage and search page banners directing users to the CDC and r/Coronavirus."

Reddit declined to answer whether it considers anti-mask and anti-vaccine rhetoric amidst a deadly pandemic to be encouraging harm. On an entirely unrelated note, I'm starting a subreddit dedicated to telling people seatbelts and speed limits are a violation of their civil liberties, because apparently I can.

UPDATE: Aug. 26, 2021, 11:27 p.m. AEST This article has been updated to include Reddit's statement.

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Reddit rejects moderators' call for harsher measures against COVID-19 misinformation - Mashable

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Ajith's 'Valimai' to Vijay's 'Master': Check out the most-tweeted hashtags of 2021 in India - The New Indian Express

Taliban members patrol the streets of Jalalabad city, Afghanistan on August 17, 2021, as the Taliban takes control of Afghanistan after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.

Stringer | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

World leaders are racing to evacuate their citizens from Afghanistan after the Taliban's lightning takeover last week but the impact of the Islamist militants' control will have implications beyond its borders, analysts warn.

The capital of Kabul fell into the hands of the ultraconservative militants more than a week ago, marking the collapse of the civilian government as the U.S. withdrew its military presence ahead of the Aug. 31 deadline.

The international community will likely have to confront three issues as the Taliban's takeover reverberates across the globe, experts told CNBC.

They include: a rise in terrorism activities, an influx of refugees as Afghans flee violence and persecution, as well as escalating tensions between India and its neighbors, Pakistan and China.

Afghanistan could once again become a "hotbed" for terrorism, providing sanctuary for extremists, experts warned.

The Taliban have "never broken" their alliance with al-Qaeda over the last two decades despite military pressure and two years of negotiations in Qatar, according to Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security.

A United Nations report this year reached a similar conclusion: It said the Taliban and al-Qaeda "remain closely aligned and show no indication of breaking ties." The Taliban previously refuted those claims.

The militant group has said it would not allow other terrorist organizations to use Afghanistan as a base to launch attacks, but some analysts expressed doubts over its pledge.

"The Taliban doesn't really stick to its ideals. We will have to wait and see," Amir Handjani, a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told CNBC's "Capital Connection" last Tuesday.

As the Taliban swept across Afghanistan, it reportedly released about 5,000 to 7,000 prisoners from Parwan prison some of whom are hardened Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters.

Fontaine explained that the thinking in the U.S. is that it can handle any potential threats from outside Afghanistan. "We'll see how effective that is, if it comes to that. But I think it's something of a gamble," he added.

Afghanistan was a haven for terrorist groups when the Taliban were in power in the late 1990s. But the U.S. invaded the country in 2001 after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Former U.S. national security advisor John Bolton told CNBC last week that the U.S. invasion was targeted at ousting the Taliban and the "sanctuary they had provided to al-Qaeda."

There are growing fears of an impending refugee crisis much like the one from 2015, when more than a million refugees fled the war in Syria to seek refuge in Europe.

"You are likely to have an influx of refugees pretty much anywhere the [Afghans] can go," said Shamaila Khan, director of emerging market debt at AllianceBernstein.

"We can see from the pictures that have emerged from Kabul airport that they are desperate to leave, so if they can find a route to any of these countries, they will go," she told CNBC's "Squawk Box Asia" last Tuesday.

Scenes of thousands of Afghans at the Hamid Karzai International Airport, desperate to escape the country, flooded social media and grabbed media headlines last week. One video showed a U.S. military aircraft attempting to take off as Afghans ran alongside and clung to the exterior of the plane as it lifted off.

Analysts from Eurasia Group, however, said in a recent note that the European Union's concerns about an influx of Afghan refugees may be overblown since the bloc has taken steps to reduce irregular migration.

Additionally, anti-refugee sentiment in Turkey where many refugees normally travel through could mean President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may take a tougher stance against migrants. Any refugee influx that reaches the EU will likely be "manageable," Eurasia Group said.

The political chaos in Afghanistan could spill into neighboring countries, and potentially exacerbate tensions between India and its neighbors, Pakistan and China.

Indian analysts are worried that the Taliban's return may create space for terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed to launch attacks against Indian targets, according to Elizabeth Threlkeld, senior fellow and deputy director of the South Asia Program at the Stimson Center.

"They also recognize that a Taliban government would give Pakistan significant influence in Kabul to India's detriment," she told CNBC.

India appears to have adopted a wait-and-see approach for now. If an attack against Indian targets were to originate from Afghanistan, New Delhi would almost "certainly point the finger of blame at Islamabad," explained Threlkeld, who was previously a foreign service officer with the U.S. State Department in Pakistan.

"The result [will] be an India-Pakistan crisis with dangerous escalatory potential," she said, adding it will likely be easier for Pakistan and China to seek deals with the Taliban to ensure their security.

While India has reportedly made efforts to engage with the Taliban, experts say it will be harder for New Delhi to secure similar deals to those with Pakistan and China. India's political willingness to do so would also be less, they added.

If renewed instability in Afghanistan spreads to Pakistan, India may also be compelled to shore up its defenses along the western border that may limit New Delhi's attention and resources to respond to Beijing's military pressure, according to Eurasia Group.

Threlkeld pointed out that although neighboring countries are wise to be concerned, it is still "too soon to say how significant the terrorist threat from a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan will be."

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Three ways the victory of the Taliban might reverberate around the world - CNBC