Two Cheers for Purgatory

Thank you for that article on the decline of faith. It was an enjoyable essay, and my reaction to it has nothing to do with schadenfreude, because the trends you cite worry me, too. What impressed me was how you covered a lot of ground in a little space, then added a dollop of wisdom. Writing like that spurs me into raising my own game when submitting work to the magazine. I meant to say so in the online comments associated with your essay, but was intimidated when I noticed that more than a hundred people had already weighed in on what you said by the time I read it. Not all of the respondents moved discussion forward -- did a comic war over whether scripture has any warrant for eating pork really need to break out? -- but obviously you touched a nerve that needed touching.