This is an excerpt of a speech by the Catholic writer Mary Eberstadt and published in NR. Since NR (National Review) allows a limited number of free articles (don’t need a subscription; I got in without one) you should be able to access it. The link is the sub title and I have excerpted a few paragraphs. I’ve bolded a sentence which has been my experience and I’d say the experience in our own parish.
Another of the many signs of hope. …
Signs of a religious revival gaining momentum in academia.
… Yet the tantalizing question remains: Might familiarity bias toward signs of what’s wrong out there obscure just a little of what’s right?
Begin that thought experiment by considering some of what I saw during a visit to Cornell University last spring. In April 2025, I returned to my alma mater at the invitation of Chesterton House, the Evangelical residential study center, and another relative newcomer to campus, the COLLIS Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture.
Initially, their overtures made me a little queasy. Such were my memories of a resolutely secularist Cornell in the early 1980s that I recall asking my family one night, when weighing the invitations, “Do you think anyone will throw rocks?” Expectations, you could say, were low.
Imagine my surprise upon finding not only a hearty welcome throughout several appearances and talks with undergraduate and graduate students alike, but something else unexpected: a dynamic Christianity woven into daily life, shared by scores, centered in significant part on Chesterton House. During that visit, I experienced several aspects of the house and its works. In addition to a public presentation on campus hosted by COLLIS, I also enjoyed Chesterton’s more intimate setting. The questions following my evening talk there were serious, and seriously well informed; students lingered afterward, even though exams were around the corner.
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Both of these relatively new institutions embody something essential to moral renaissance in any age: energy and momentum. In that sense, both Chesterton House and COLLIS amount to microcosms of a wider, also unanticipated social evolution.
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To put the point in secular terms, history’s wheel is turning. Or, as believers might say, the Spirit is manifestly on the move. In the United States today, energy and momentum — what chess players know as tempo — are no longer reliably on the side of religion’s cultured despisers. They are no longer the exclusive province of religious denialism. In a shift that few would have predicted 20, or even ten, years ago, those assets today are to be found, more and more, among the believers.
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Yes, American churches continue to lose more believers than they gain — but the losses look to be those who were only weakly attached in the first place, whereas the gains compensate for smaller numbers with purpose and zeal.
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To offer two examples, consider the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, or FOCUS. This band of brothers and sisters can now be found on 210 quads in the U.S. and nine internationally. There are more than 75,000 FOCUS alumni — and this dynamic Christian fellowship did not so much as exist 30 years ago.
Or contemplate Thomistic Circles, a thriving project of the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., which now sports student chapters on more than 100 campuses in the United States, the U.K., and Ireland. These chapters did not exist even a dozen years ago. This flourishing, too, is a sign that few observers, religious or otherwise, would have predicted at the turn of the 21st century, or beyond — until recently.
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In my 2012 book Adam and Eve After the Pill, I argued that the revolution amounted to a net loss for everyone. Back then, that thesis was considered shocking outside religious circles; one liberal friend remarked that I’d committed career suicide. Yet today, authors of varying prominence make the same case in mainstream venues not only in the United States but across the Anglosphere — and secular readers respond.
Small wonder. The social science instruments available to us suggest with ever more precision that, in losing God, the West lost plenty else — including the blueprint to long-term love, the family; and a society that is not a forever war of all against all. Again: tempo. When no less an authority than alpha atheist Richard Dawkins professes nostalgia for a more Christian time, the needle pointing toward or away from Scripture has moved. When Douglas Murray speaks wistfully about traditional Catholicism, it shifts again.
Eberstadt ends with this paragraph.
Today, bit by bit, a newly purposeful American Christianity is helping to knit up the raveled sleeve of Christian division. In that light, it seems fitting to close with a thought by the great G.K. himself. He said, “Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.” By 2026, against a backdrop where admittedly darkness intrudes, something new is afoot: unexpected or no, the love affair of believers for the faith has lately taken a purposeful, collective step out of yesterday’s shadows and back into the public square.
