Last week Jonathan Last pointed to an article on Church music in the Washington Post . It’s a great find, all about the generational change from the older Catholics to the new.
The ” Swallows of Capistrano ” are what I’ve come to call this younger generation of Catholics, but the piece in the Washington Post left me a litlte depressed. Why did I need to write 10,000 words on the topic? In the Washington Post , we get the point about the Swallows in a single sentence: Says Jeffrey Tucker, a choir director in Alabama, “The young priests and the young people just can’t seem to get ‘hep’ to the whole 1970s thing, and the old people just don’t understand why.”
“Just can’t seem to get hep”—you can’t do better than that for a description of today’s Catholic youth.
Dear Reader,
Can I be direct with you?
War abroad. Socialists on the rise. AI upending human life. Endless uproar online. The modern attention economy doesn’t want readers — it wants users enslaved to the tyranny of the present.
First Things is the antidote: literary excellence, timeless truths, and a fixed point of reference in a culture that has lost its bearings.
But we can’t do it without readers like you.
Our goal: Raise $150,000 by November 1 to sustain First Things in the year ahead.
Your gift anchors readers in the permanent things.
Make your Fall Campaign gift now using the button below.
If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact Giovanni Del Piero, Director of the Editor’s Circle, at gdelpiero@firstthings.com or 212-627-1985.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Church in the Age of Therapy
In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic that “Religious man was born to…
Canada’s Deadliest Blind Spot
On September 20, the Daily Mail ran a story with the provocative headline, “Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother…
The Faithful Joy of Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen
Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen seem to have had little in common. She favored rhinestones; he wore…
