Lab director in The Chautauquan Daily

Lab Director Wendy Cadge recently spoke at The Chautauqua Institution’s Interfaith Lecture Series. Her address was covered by The Chautauquan Daily. An excerpt is below, and the full article can be found here. The original full address can be found here.

American religion, according to Cadge, is in the middle of a “tectonic shift in its delivery system.”

“Religion isn’t going away,” Cadge said. “But the congregation, local clergy and other traditional institutions through which my parents and grandparents engaged with religion and spirituality and many of life’s eternal questions, are on the decline.”

Cadge says this varies by location, but the decline in traditional practice is present across the country and in most faiths.

“American religion is changing,” Cadge said. “These changes have been happening for some time, and we’re in a transitional — what the sociologist Ann Swidler would call — an ‘unsettled’ time right now.”

The changes, Cadge said, are affecting the “delivery systems through which we engage with life’s eternal questions” more than the answers to those questions. 

However, that doesn’t mean there’s a dearth of religious thought. New systems are being created in the “spiritual infrastructure of the future.”

Read the full article here.

Photo: Wendy Cadge, the Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanistic Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University, opens the Week Three Interfaith Lecture Series theme dedicated to “Faith and Health: Considering the Center of Wellbeing in America” Monday, July 11 in the Hall of Philosophy. Carrie Legg/ The Daily Chautauquan Staff Photographer