{"id":3749,"date":"2010-09-20T19:22:55","date_gmt":"2010-09-20T23:22:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/?p=3749"},"modified":"2010-09-20T19:22:55","modified_gmt":"2010-09-20T23:22:55","slug":"my-two-centspence-on-religion-in-england","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/2010\/09\/my-two-centspence-on-religion-in-england\/","title":{"rendered":"My Two Cents\/Pence on Religion in England"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most of you have been writing about the secular nature of churches in England, how they don\u2019t really seem like a spiritual community, and how it is a bit disturbing that all of them come with cafes and gift shops.\u00a0 While I agree with these thoughts, I don\u2019t think that it is necessarily all bad, and I think that we need to consider that we are not seeing the entire picture.<\/p>\n

I think that the secularism of the Anglican Church particularly stands out against our visits to the Mandir and the mosque.\u00a0 At these places of worship, people go to pray every day and there are spiritual ceremonies every day as well.\u00a0 They each have schools, child care centers, and service projects that reach out to the community.\u00a0 I can see where we might wonder why we are not seeing the Anglican Church step up to its role as a spiritual and community leader, but remember that we discussed in our first ever class meeting how in these minority communities, religion is very much one and the same with culture, especially in Islam.\u00a0 The difficulties they have assimilating into English culture are due in large part to religion.\u00a0 Religious teachings and traditions have become well ingrained cultural traditions.\u00a0 Anglicanism is a relatively new religion in comparison with Hindu and Islam, and does not play the role of being one and the same with culture like it does in the other communities.\u00a0 And when you are the majority community racially, religiously, politically etc\u2026it doesn\u2019t need to be.<\/p>\n

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the Mandir, courtesy of it’s website mandir.org<\/p>\n

The second point I wanted to make in this post is that Westminster Abbey and St. Paul\u2019s do remember their function as places of worship.\u00a0 I was on the Westminster Abbey tour with the science group.\u00a0 We were there at noon, and at that time an announcement came on that called for a moment of silence.\u00a0 John reminded us that we were in a church, not a museum, and I noticed that nearly everyone visiting the Abbey at that time, tourists included, was respectful of this moment.\u00a0 I also attended Evensong at St. Paul\u2019s and thought that it was a beautiful and moving experience.\u00a0 I think that they balance their two roles as best as they can, and hey, if my church had a caf\u00e9, I would use it.\u00a0 Speaking of places of worship that balance spirituality and tourism, look at Vatican City.\u00a0 No one can argue that this is not a deeply meaningful and spiritual place; Catholics journey from miles around to hear the Pope speak on Christmas, or at any other time of the year really, but it is also a huge attraction, complete with guided tours through St. Peters and rampant pick pocketing.<\/p>\n

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photo credit: Google Images<\/p>\n

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photo credit: Google Images.\u00a0 All of these buildings were too big and beautiful for me to take a good picture of them myself.<\/p>\n

Finally, the fact remains that we have not been to any small Anglican parishes in specific residential neighborhoods of London.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure that there are religious Anglicans in London who do go to church every Sunday and whose churches run community service projects and functions, but, similar to your local church at home, which also attracts no visitors, these churches probably don\u2019t have history such as the Battle of Hastings and the Great Fire of London surrounding them.\u00a0 We definitely are not seeing the whole picture here, which is why I cannot join in lamenting and expressing disappointment in places like Westminster Abbey or St. Paul\u2019s, or the Anglican Church in general.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most of you have been writing about the secular nature of churches in England, how they don\u2019t really seem like a spiritual community, and how it is a bit disturbing that all of them come with cafes and gift shops.\u00a0 While I agree with these thoughts, I don\u2019t think that it is necessarily all bad, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":444,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6679],"tags":[15120,81,1233,1190,15193,916,969,15194,934],"class_list":["post-3749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-kaitlin","tag-anglicanism","tag-hindu","tag-islam","tag-mandir","tag-mosque","tag-religion","tag-st-pauls-cathedral","tag-vatican-city","tag-westminster-abbey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3749","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\/444"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3749\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}