Greetings and welcome to the Tuesday, November the 18th, 2025 edition of Denison Forum's Daily

Article Podcast. Cultural Theologian, Dr. Jim Denison, authored today's article. I'm Chris Elkins,

narrator. Tom Cruise received his first Academy Award this week, an honorary Oscar presented at the 16th annual Academy Governor's Awards.

He told the assembled gathering,

Making films is not what I do, it's who I am.

Then he added, I will always do everything I can to help this art form,

to support and champion new voices to protect what

makes cinema powerful, hopefully without too many more broken bones.

Equating what we do with who we are, our performance with our identity is not a worldview

unique to Mr. Cruz.

We are made with a God-shaped emptiness, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal,

but if secularized people will not turn to God, they will turn to anything else to fill the void.

For many in a materialistic culture, our gods are therefore material measures of success,

such as performance, possessions, and popularity.

Accordingly, perhaps we should not be surprised that Gallup is now reporting the current drop in U.S. religiosity as among the largest in the world. In 2015, 66% of U.S. adults

said religion was an important part of their daily life.

Today, only 49% agree.

This 17-point drop ranks among the largest gallop has recorded in any country over any 10-year period since 2007.

In a brilliant analysis of our cultural moment, the author and cultural commentator

John Seale asserts that we are living through a civilization inflection. He describes this

inflection writing, the late sociologist Philip Reef called our moment a third culture, a social

order that has severed its link to the sacred. First cultures,

...