"We are at the water's edge of the argument that mainstream Christian teaching is hate speech."

"Because today, we've reached the point in our society where, if you do not support same-sex marriage, you are labeled a homophobe and a hater.... After they are done going after individuals, the next step is to argue that the teachings of mainstream Christianity, the catechism of the Catholic Church, is hate speech and there�s a real and present danger.�

Said Marco Rubio.

"The first lesson he taught was what to leave out... He was a demon about clutter."

He = William Zinsser, author of "On Writing Well," who has died at the age of 92 dead at 92.

William Knowlton Zinsser was born in Manhattan on Oct. 7, 1922. He escaped the urgings of his father to join the family�s shellac business but could not escape his mother�s counsel that being cheerful was a Christian obligation.

Click for more �

In 2007, 78.4% of Americans were Christian, in 2014, only 70.6%.

According to the Pew's new U.S. Religious Landscape Study.

The decline appears largely in the mainline Protestant and Catholic segment of Christians, evangelicals having lost only one percentage point.

Those who name no religious affiliation have grown from 16.1% to 22.8% in this 7 year period. That segment is broken down into 3 groups: atheist, agnostic, and "nothing in particular." The "nothing in particular" people dominate. 15.8% of Americans affiliate with nothing religious, up from 12.1%. Atheists have broken through to 3.1%, up from 1.6%, but they're still trailing the agnostics, who've made it to 4.0%, up from 2.4%.

It's interesting to separate "nothing in particular" from agnostic. Is "nothing in particular" even more agnostic than agnostic? They don't even want to go out on a limb and say they don't know? Or (more likely) these are the people who feel they are spiritual or they believe in God in a way that doesn't lead them to join any organizations or they used to be something � such as mainline Protestant � but they lost the sense that membership in that group meant anything. So you can't add the nothings and the agnostics.

These "nothing in particular" people, at 15.8%, now outnumber the mainline Protestants, who are down to 14.7%, from 18.1%.

It's also interesting that Mormons � who might seem like a large and growing group � are only 1.6%, down from 1.7%. And how about Muslims? You hear so much about them, but they're only 0.9% (up from 0.4%). Buddhists hold steady at 0.7%. Hindus are up to 0.7%, from 0.3%. The biggest non-Christian religion is Judaism, and it's not declining. It's up to 1.9%, from 1.7%.

Much more at the link, including issues of age, race, region, and switching religions.

"This [law] professor is a practicing Christian, deeply closeted in the workplace..."

"...he is convinced that if his colleagues in academia knew of his faith, they would make it very hard for him.... He agreed to speak with me" � writes Rod Dreher � "about the Indiana situation on condition that I not identify him by name or by institution."

�The fact that Mike Pence can�t articulate [religious liberty], and Asa Hutchinson doesn�t care and can�t articulate it, is shocking,� Kingsfield [a pseudonym] said. �Huckabee gets it and Santorum gets it, but they�re marginal figures. Why can�t Republicans articulate this? We don�t have anybody who gets it and who can unite us. Barring that, the craven business community will drag the Republican Party along wherever the culture is leading, and lawyers, academics, and media will cheer because they can�t imagine that they might be wrong about any of it.�...

Christians should put their families on a �media fast,� he says. �Throw out the TV. Limit Netflix. You cannot let in contemporary stuff. It�s garbage. It�s a sewage pipe into your home. So many parents think they�re holding the line, but they let their kids have unfettered access to TV, the Internet, and smartphones. You can�t do that. And if you can�t trust that the families of the kids that your kids play with are on the same team with all this, then find another peer group among families that are,� he said. �It really is that important.�

Much more at the link.

A 10-point list of Easter news.

1. "An Easter Bunny character first hopped up in the 8th century with the English monk Bede's The Reckoning of Time..."

A little girl found a bird that was close to death and prayed to Eostra [the Germanic goddess of spring and fertility] for help. Eostra appeared, crossing a rainbow bridge � the snow melting before her feet. Seeing the bird was badly wounded, she turned it into a hare, and told the little girl that from now on, the hare would come back once a year bearing rainbow colored eggs.

2. In Norway, "Each year, nearly every TV and radio channel produce a crime series for Easter. The milk company prints crime stories on their cartons. In order to cash in on this national pastime, publishers churn out series of books known as 'Easter-Thrillers' or 'P�skekrim.'"

3. The Archbishop of York said: "God is creator of the Cosmos and that includes the Palace of Westminster and the White House. There are followers of Jesus Christ in all the main political parties in the UK. It is not for me to tell their fellow church members how to vote next month, but I will encourage them to use their vote."

4. Police in Tahlequah City, Okahoma nabbed a stuffed rabbit carrying $30,000 of meth: "We�ve intercepted narcotics in the mail before... The Easter Bunny I thought was a strange touch."

5. "When Obama spotted 5-year-old Donovan Frazier distraught after losing his egg roll in 2013, the president gave him a hug and advised him to 'shake it off.'"

6. Pope Francis said: Easter is "so beautiful, and so ugly because of the rain."

He had just celebrated Mass in rain-whipped St. Peter's Square for tens of thousands of people, who huddled under umbrellas or braved the downpour in thin, plastic rain-slickers.

7. In 1926, Time Magazine considered the proposal to fix the date of the moveable feast that is Easter. Was Easter not more about commerce than religion?

People have stepped from decorating their altars to decking their bodies, until the Easter Sunday �parade� of fashionables and fops gets more notice in the lay press than does the sanctity of the holiday. This display of clothes and flowers and jewels and carriages, wily merchandisers have gloated over. None the less they have peered with squinted eye at the fluctuating date of the festival, even as they touted a robe as �hot from N� York, lady,� or �new from Paris, madame.�

8. "Do You Really Need Jesus for Easter?" asks Steve Neumann at The Atheist's Life at The Daily Beast.

[T]here simply is no supernatural realm for a God to occupy. Nature is all there is.

America's native philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson... wrote �Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist, that he could report in conversation what had befallen him.� Achieving that isn�t easy�if those impressions were too feeble 175 years ago, they�re almost undetectable now that we�re surrounded by a shell of concrete and steel, covered by a blanket of wireless radio waves....

�Time and nature yield us many gifts,� continued Emerson, �but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await.�

9. David D. Ireland of Christ Church in northern New Jersey indulges in the kind of golf meditation that used to drive me crazy when I went to church in northern New Jersey half a century ago:

Easter is God�s mulligan to humanity. In golf, a mulligan is a stroke that is replayed from the spot of the prior stroke without any penalty. Your error has been forgiven. You may take the shot again. This Easter make a commitment to meet Jesus for the first time � again. Easter reminds you to keep trying to live the God-kind of life.

10. "For Christ�s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again."

"I have kind of flashes in my mind and I try to put them on paper. Thinking? No. That is too serious."

Says the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who does not go out:

I imagine the world from my window. I�m happy wherever I am. I�m very happy to be in the Mercer right now because I bring myself with me wherever I go, thank God. Traveling, I think it�s a nightmare today. The airports and things the people in the street with the selfies � I like to stay at home and read.

What are you reading?

I will not talk about that. I like to read biographies, history, philosophical things like this. But it�s for my private use, and not for making people say, Oh, how clever this stupid man is. I don�t make intellectual conversation. I�m very superficial. I�m just a fashion designer. Fashion designers look at fashion magazines, right?

I'm quite amused by his form of expression. Short sentences that tease. Is he brilliant or an idiot? It's one thing I loved about Andy Warhol. You should read the whole interview, especially if you're into cats. Lagerfeld is quite devoted to one cat. That made me wonder whether Andy Warhol was attached to cats, and I see he put out a limited-edition book called "25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy." 

[T]here is no text in the book. The calligraphy for the book was done by Julia Warhola, Warhol's mother.... Warhol's mother left the letter "d" off of the word "Name" in the title and Warhol kept the error in, as he liked the random imperfections which appeared in his creations resulting from the techniques he used. Both Warhol and his mother had a passion for cats and they were all named Sam except for one called Hester....

Anyway, I wanted to talk about Lagerfeld's statement "I�m happy wherever I am.... I bring myself with me wherever I go." It's a sunny variation of the old "Wherever you go, there you are." Here's an old-time-y web page devoted to it: "Where have you seen or heard the quote 'No matter where you go, there you are'?" The challenge is to find a source before the iteration in the movie "Buckaroo Banzai."

Some people think their own dad started it. Many others cite Confucius. Remember when everything used to be attributed to Confucius? I think that habit was broken when it became socially unacceptable to begin the attribution with "Confucius say" � that is, leaving the letter "s" off the word "say," not as a random imperfection in the manner of Andy's mother, but following a deeply embedded convention about how to represent Chinese in English.

Somebody finds it in the 15th century devotional work by Thomas a Kempis, "The Imitation of Christ":

"So, the cross is always ready and waits for you everywhere. You cannot escape it no matter where you run, for wherever you go you are burdened with yourself. Wherever you go, there you are."

Maybe "Imitation of Christ" one of those "philosophical things" Karl Lagerfeld is reading, cat Choupette on his lap, in the Mercer Hotel. Or is he, because he is a fashion designer, reading fashion magazines? Did you know Imitation of Christ is a fashion label?

The San Francisco cathedral with a sprinkler system to repel human beings who sleep in its doorways...

... has given up the practice � apparently because it violated the city's water-use regulations (and not because the church got scourged in social media).

"The Rev. Malcolm Boyd, an Episcopal priest and author who challenged racism, war and religious complacency in the 1960s and �70s..."

"... and was one of the first prominent clergymen in America to acknowledge his homosexuality publicly, died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 91."

Wearing his clerical collar, accompanied by a jazz guitar or a blues horn, he recited talking-with-God prayers from his 1965 best-selling book, �Are You Running With Me, Jesus?�

�It�s morning, Jesus,� he�d say. �I�ve got to move fast � get into the bathroom, wash up, grab a bite to eat, and run some more. Where am I running? You know these things I can�t understand. It�s not that I need to have you tell me. What counts most is just that somebody knows, and it�s you. That helps a lot. So I�ll follow along, O.K.? But lead, Lord. Now I�ve got to run. Are you running with me, Jesus?�

(Skip ahead 4 minutes if you don't want to hear the somewhat tedious intro music... actually scroll in 5 minutes to get to Boyd.)