As someone who is fairly religious I have spent a large amount of time in London contemplating religion \u2013 something that I think many of us have done and which is a large theme in our course.\u00a0 Thus far I have been to the building of or attended a religious service in a mandir, a mosque, a Catholic mass, evensong at St. Paul\u2019s, and after today, a synagogue.\u00a0 As a practicing Catholic, I expected to feel very at home at both the Catholic service I attended and evensong (given how many similarities there are between Anglicanism and Catholicism).\u00a0 However, even sitting through a mass that I have sat through every Sunday for the last 20 years I felt completely alien.\u00a0 While the format of mass was the same and prayers were the same, the level of participation and tone of the homily were unlike anything I had ever experienced.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, when Mary, Mary Kate, Jamie, and I walked two blocks to the Newman House I had pretty low expectations as to what mass would be like.\u00a0 The mass put on at Dickinson every weekend is quick, easy, and low on congregational participation.\u00a0 Back home in California, my church puts a large focus on intellectual exploration of scriptures and does not discuss controversial issues.\u00a0 Instead, on Sunday I attended a service where everyone was active and where I heard an extremely rousing and inspiring homily.\u00a0 The priest completely ignored the gospel for the day (which was the famous tale of the prodigal son) and discussed the upcoming papal visit, general English views of Catholicism, homosexuality, and the previous mistakes made by the Catholic Church.\u00a0\u00a0 The priest discussed the lack of positive press about the Catholic Church in England and tied that to the English fear of popery \u2013 he even made continual jokes about how the English still see the Spanish armada sailing across the Channel to turn them all back to Catholicism.\u00a0 He then spent a long time discussing homosexuality \u2013 a topic that never EVER came up in my more conservative Church (which is ironically enough considered very liberal among Catholics in the area).\u00a0 He said that it was unacceptable and sin to denounce anyone, including members of the LGBT community.\u00a0 He argued that just because we are Catholic we are not allowed to hate or discriminate.\u00a0 He stemmed his next point off of this idea \u2013 he said that we should not look at the Catholic Church as infallible.\u00a0 He made the point that we cannot pretend that the priest abuse scandal didn\u2019t happen and that we must admit that the Catholic Church mishandled the debacle.\u00a0 His over reaching message, however, was tolerance, acceptance, and education about Catholicism.<\/p>\n
The idea of education leading to tolerance and acceptance has been the general message of most of our visits to religious institutions.\u00a0 Both the mandir and the mosque were exercises in religious education and both of our guides spent a lot of time discussing religious doctrine and the need for understanding about different religions.\u00a0 In the face of all the religious discrimination and controversy surrounding both the building of a mosque near where the Twin Towers once stood and the minister threatening to burn Korans in Florida in the United States, its refreshing and reassuring to know that somewhere in the world there is religious dialogue occurring and several different faiths are trying to bridge gaps and end violence and discrimination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As someone who is fairly religious I have spent a large amount of time in London contemplating religion \u2013 something that I think many of us have done and which is a large theme in our course.\u00a0 Thus far I have been to the building of or attended a religious service in a mandir, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":446,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6678,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-amy","category-churches-and-cathedrals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/446"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}