In his Newsweek cover story, "Forget the Church, Follow Jesus," Andrew Sullivan dissects the crisis of American Christianity--it has become hypocritical and irrelevant to millions. Organized religion is collapsing; atheism is rising. The wounded, lapsed, and doubting seek shelter in spirituality, away from the buildings and traditions that once housed faith.

None of this particularly surprised me, as I wrote several weeks ago about the end of church, here on Huffington Post. My gloomy assessment of American religious life was drawn from my new book, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, the first third of which covers the same ground as Sullivan. We come to the same conclusion: Christianity is flailing and failing. It needs to change--and fast.

...yet another writer trying to help religionists to make sense of the fact that their churches no longer attract and hold them. Her take on a new way to look at basic questions is good, but...

^195:9.8 The world needs more firsthand religion. Even Christianity—the best of the religions of the twentieth century—is not only a religion about Jesus, but it is so largely one which men experience secondhand. They take their religion wholly as handed down by their accepted religious teachers. What an awakening the world would experience if it could only see Jesus as he really lived on earth and know, firsthand, his life-giving teachings! Descriptive words of things beautiful cannot thrill like the sight thereof, neither can creedal words inspire men’s souls like the experience of knowing the presence of God. But expectant faith will ever keep the hope-door of man’s soul open for the entrance of the eternal spiritual realities of the divine values of the worlds beyond.