In all cases there is a stairway, often long and steep, crumbling with time and worn with the feet of pious generations. If he takes a pious subject, it is to show you in what a fine way he, Peter Paul Rubens, can treat it. New Word List Word List.
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See religious. New Atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, became intellectual celebrities; the best seller American Theocracy argued that evangelicals in the Republican coalition were staging a quiet coup that would plunge the country into disarray and financial ruin. Throughout the Bush presidency, liberal voters—especially white liberal voters— detached from organized religion in ever-higher numbers. Religion has lost its halo effect in the past three decades, not because science drove God from the public square, but rather because politics did.
Other social forces, which have little to do with geopolitics or partisanship, have played a key role in the rise of the nones. The Church is just one of many social institutions—including banks, Congress, and the police—that have lost public trust in an age of elite failure. But scandals in the Catholic Church have accelerated its particularly rapid loss of moral stature. Nor does Smith rule out the familiar antagonists of capitalism and the internet in explaining the popularity of non-affiliation.
Most important has been the dramatic changes in the American family. The past half century has dealt a series of body blows to American marriage. Read: The not-so-great reason divorce rates are declining. But just as stable families make stable congregations, family instability can destabilize the Church. Divorced individuals, single parents, and children of divorce or single-parent households are all more likely to detach over time from their congregations.
More Americans, especially college graduates in big metro areas, are putting off marriage and childbearing until their 30s, and are using their 20s to establish a career, date around, and enjoy being young and single in a city. By the time they settle down, they have established a routine—work, brunch, gym, date, drink, football—that leaves little room for weekly Mass.
The rise of the nones shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, the religious identity that seems to be doing the best job at both retaining old members and attracting new ones is the newfangled American religion of Nothing Much at All. But the liberal politics of young people brings us to the first big reason to care about rising non-affiliation.
Although it would be wrong to call Democrats a secular party older black voters are highly religious and dependably vote Democratic , the left today has a higher share of religiously unaffiliated voters than anytime in modern history.
At the same time, the average religiosity of white Christian Republicans has gone up, according to Robert P. American politics is at risk of becoming a war of religiosity versus secularism by proxy, where both sides see the other as a catastrophic political force that must be destroyed at all costs. The deeper question is whether the sudden loss of religion has social consequences for Americans who opt out. Secular Americans, who are familiar with the ways that traditional faiths have betrayed modern liberalism, may not have examined how organized religion has historically offered solutions to their modern existential anxieties.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest. Over the years other meanings have developed too. Pious can be used positively to describe those who are dutiful or virtuous, or things that are worthy.
And it can be used negatively to describe hypocrisy. Joseph was an elderly, nay, an old man—very old, perhaps, though hale and sinewy. Because the word is about religion and religiousness, many associate pious with the Bible.
It is, however, wholly absent from many translations of the Bible, probably because of its ambiguous meaning. The blessing of the Lord is the reward of the pious, and quickly God causes his blessing to flourish.
You try to look like saintly men, but underneath those pious robes of yours are hearts besmirched with every sort of hypocrisy and sin. Piety , which most often refers to simple religious devotion, doesn't have the same problem, and is more widely used in biblical translations. These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'pious.
Send us feedback. See more words from the same century. Accessed 14 Nov. See the full definition for pious in the English Language Learners Dictionary.
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