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Letters

I very much enjoyed Armin Rosen’s essay about the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (“Tarkovksy’s Sublime Terror,” October 2023), but I’m afraid he has made an error of fact about Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia. Rosen says the protagonist, Andrei Gorchakov, “swallows poison and then . . . . Continue Reading »

Losing Their Religion

Nonverts—people who once identified with a religious tradition but now identify with none—are the fastest-growing group in surveys of American religion. They make up the great majority of those (now a quarter of the adult population) who say they have no religion. In this study, Stephen . . . . Continue Reading »

Sally Rooney’s Catholic Millennials

Recently, while reading Sally Rooney’s hugely acclaimed novels for the first time, I messaged a friend to say how bleak I was finding them. He replied that his impression of the books was different. In a way, we were both right. On the one hand, the novels have shafts of light and humor; . . . . Continue Reading »

Belief Limbo

In September 2017, the Public Religion Research Institute published a study of religion in America that showed a tripling of the religiously unaffiliated since 1990, from 8 percent to 24 percent of the population. The majority of the unaffiliated call themselves secular; a quarter of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Evangelizing the Nones

By far the fastest-growing “religious” group in the United States is the “nones,” that is, those who claim no religious affiliation. In the latest Pew Research Center survey, fully 25 percent of the country—80 million people—say that they have no formal religion, and the growth . . . . Continue Reading »

Christian but Not Religious

Recently, a pastor at an Evangelical church in New York City (we have them) told me about a young man in his congregation who had joined an online dating site. The young man was a Christian believer who wanted to find a woman with the same values. Yet when it came to telling prospective mates about . . . . Continue Reading »

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