Adhan at Duke . . . oops, nope

A couple days ago, former fellow UNC alums posted to Facebook the news that Duke (where many of us took classes) had granted permission for Muslim students to perform the adhan–the call of prayer–from atop the campus’s iconic chapel bell tower. (A weekly Friday prayer service is held in the chapel basement.) “How nice,” I thought. “Good for the Dukies.”

Now the word is out that the administration has rescinded permission. A key player in that abrupt reversal is Franklin Graham, who lambasted the adhan plan on Facebook, then elaborated to the news media as follows:

“As Christianity is being excluded from the public square and followers of Islam are raping, butchering, and beheading Christians, Jews, and anyone who doesn’t submit to their Sharia Islamic law, Duke is promoting this in the name of religious pluralism,” Graham wrote on Facebook.

In an interview Thursday before the reversal, Graham told The Charlotte Observer that Duke should not allow the chapel to be used for the call to prayer. “It’s wrong because it’s a different god,” he said. “Using the bell tower, that signifies worship of Jesus Christ. Using (it) as a minaret is wrong.”

Graham did say Muslim students should be allowed to worship on campus. “Let Duke donate the land and let Saudi Arabia build a mosque for them.”

And referencing the recent terrorist attacks in France, Graham added, “Islam is not a religion of peace.”

(Charlotte Observer, Jan. 15, 2015)

The inevitable irony: Omid Safi reports that threats of violence were made against people at Duke by opponents of the adhan plan.

And who says Duke is losing its historic Christian identity?

Still an ethnic church, but…

Last month, my husband and I attended a posada organized by Guatemalan immigrants living in the Price Hill area of Cincinnati. Afterward, we took the dog (who was waiting bundled up in the car) for a little walk down the street. On the corner was an old church. A sign in German carved over the door identified it as the First German Evangelical Protestant Church, founded in 1886. However, the German immigrants long since became upwardly mobile and moved out. The building is now in the hands of a different ethnic minority: new signage, in Spanish, identified the building as home to the Hispanic Nazareth Evangelical Church. Still an “evangelical” group–but in a different sense of the word.

Catholics in St. Anthony, Idaho, 1909

I was leafing this morning through Orbis Books’ documentary history The Frontiers and Catholic Identities, when my eye was caught by a reference to St. Anthony, Idaho, the little town where I spent my elementary school years. (My parents moved us out of St. Anthony at the right time to leave me with happy Lake Wobegonish childhood memories of the place rather than hellish hicktown junior high memories. Sorry, St. Anthony–you are what you are.) The historical document having to do with St. Anthony was part of Father Alvah W. Doran’s account of a 1909 missionary tour he made on the coincidentally named St. Anthony Chapel Car. Here’s what he had to say about his stop in the town of St. Anthony:

We could not omit this town, however much work our shortness of time compelled us to leave undone this trip in Idaho. The honor of the Chapel Car’s patron saint constrained us to preach his religion to a community as ignorant of it as they were of how their town received its good name. There are a handful of the very best kind of Catholics here, and the foundations have been dug for a church. We trust that our work will raise it above ground-level soon. St. Anthony, pray for them! […] At this place the opera-house had been lately burned but the Mormons granted the use of their meeting-house. Thursday evening the Mormon choir had a rehearsal, and then remained to sing at our services. (The Frontiers and Catholic Identities, pp. 125-126)

I would guess that the church whose construction he refers to is the same little Catholic church that was standing in St. Anthony when I lived there–and which is still standing there: Mary Immaculate. Here are some photos from the church’s website.

The last time I visited St. Anthony, over a decade ago, the church had installed a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe out front–a sign of the times. I knew already (from a Mexican immigrant family I met while volunteering as a medical interpreter at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City) that St. Anthony had experienced an upsurge of Latino residents.

I can’t imagine that the Mormon church I attended while living in St. Anthony is the same one Fr. Doran preached at in 1909, though I wonder if it might have stood on the same site.

Exploring the Burned Over District

I’m in the thick of preparing for final exams, so here’s a quick post: My sister-in-law directed me recently to the blog Exploring the Burned Over District. Fun for an American religious historian like myself! Their slogan: “Chris and Luke visit all the sacred sites in upstate New York that will let them in.” I’ve been wanting to do a tour along those lines myself, on a smaller scale. So far, they have a nice mix of different religious traditions whose sites they’ve visited, as you’ll see if you scroll down to their list of Categories. I like their map feature, too.

In Nauvoo… with Catholics

I just returned from a mildly pluralistic holiday getaway in Nauvoo, Illinois, which my husband and I were interested in visiting because it’s a Mormon historical site–the last city Mormons established during Joseph Smith’s lifetime, and the place where some of Mormonism’s most distinctive doctrines and rites were introduced. (My husband and I were both raised LDS.) Most of the reconstructed buildings in historic Nauvoo are owned by the LDS Church; a few years back, that community also rebuilt the Nauvoo Temple, which was first constructed in the 1840s and once again now occupies a very high-profile place on the skyline overlooking the Mississippi River.

However, certain Nauvoo sites associated with Smith himself are owned not by the LDS Church but by the much less well known Community of Christ, Mormonism’s second-largest denomination, which in recent decades has undergone something of what I would call a “Protestantization.” The sites owned by Community of Christ include Smith’s two homes; his “red brick store,” where the LDS Church’s women’s organization was founded and where key esoteric rites were introduced; and Smith’s grave. During the couple of days we spent in Nauvoo, my husband and I stayed in a home in the Community of Christ-owned portion of the historic village; the home had been built in the 1840s to serve as a hotel.

On the block adjoining the Nauvoo Temple, sharing the skyline with it, is a Catholic church, Sts. Peter and Paul. Not being  welcome to worship in the LDS temple, I decided to attend Saturday night Mass at their next door neighbor’s. (Although never Catholic, I served in the 1990s as a volunteer in a Catholic mission, doing community development work in the Dominican Republic, the same country where I had been a Mormon missionary a few years earlier.) The sanctuary was painted pink and filled with Victorian statuary in pastel colors of the kind that immediately makes me think: German immigrants. The pre-Vatican II altar was still in place behind the post-Vatican II table.

There was a curious moment at the end of the Prayers of the People, when the priest announced that they were now going to recite the prayer to St. Michael for religious freedom–which everyone but me, it seemed, proceeded to do from memory. The prayer didn’t overtly mention religious freedom: it was a traditional-sounding petition calling on the archangel to stamp down the forces of evil. I wondered: Was this prayer a local custom? Or is this a practice that the bishops have been promoting nationally in the wake of the controversy over religious exceptions under Obamacare? Can any Catholic readers enlighten me?

Muslim and Pentecostal neighbors

This is a photo I took last month while I was in Salt Lake City for the annual meeting of the Mormon History Association. A friend and I were driving into northwest Salt Lake from the airport when my friend needed a Taco Bell break. Right across the street were a masjid and a Pentecostal church side by side, both occupying buildings originally constructed for businesses. ProjectilePluralism moment!

Sacred Spaces of Greater Cincinnati

This weekend I watched a DVD produced by our local public television station: Sacred Spaces of Greater Cincinnati. It was interesting; gave me a new list of places to go visit when I get a chance. The documentary was, as you might expect, tilted heavily toward 19th-century churches–predominantly Catholic, followed numerically by historic Protestant churches, plus Plum Temple and a couple other Jewish houses of worship. The classic tripartite: Catholic, Protestant, Jew. But modest kudos to the producers for making some more expansive moves:

• They started by acknowledging the mounds built by Native peoples (cue the flutes; you can’t mention Native Americans in a historical documentary without playing a flute in the background). That segment was over pretty quick, though, apparently because we don’t have any surviving mounds in the Cincinnati area.
• There was an intriguing look at a Swedenborgian church built around 1860. Cincinnati’s Hindu temple and Islamic center were both featured. And in an unexpected but thoughtful move, the documentary looked briefly, at least, at a couple of megachurches as representative of new trends in sacred space.
• I understand now why we have so many synagogues turned churches here (something I noted in an earlier post). These are, more specifically, African American churches, whose congregations were displaced by a project of “urban renewal” during the 1950s and 1960s, when the city tore down black neighborhoods to make room for the freeway system. This segment was the documentary’s strongest move toward paying attention to social context and power relations.
• There was an intriguing segment–too brief, alas!–on the abandonment or destruction of sacred spaces: historic but irretrievable murals destroyed when a 19th-century church was demolished; old churches sitting abandoned; churches repurposed to serve as office space for a non-profit, or as an outlet for American Eagle Outfitters.

It would be an interesting exercise to do a close reading of the flowery prose that opens and ends the documentary, when the narrator articulates the significance of these sacred spaces. These spaces are important for all kinds of reasons, we’re told–i.e., they do all kinds of positive things for individuals, families, and communities. But the things the documentary named were, to my recollection, all “secular” in nature–the kinds of functions that could readily fall within the purview of sociological discourse (e.g., providing a focus for immigrant community life). There was no attempt to describe the meaning of “sacred spaces” in the kinds of terms that religious studies scholars have developed to try to separate religion out from other domains of culture–no talk about spirituality, or people’s conceptions of the divine, ultimate meaning, etc. I intend no judgment in making this observation; I’m simply intrigued by it as a rhetorical move and interested in speculating about the cultural calculus that motivated it.

Park51

I hate the fact that because we call the attacks of September 11, 2001, “9-11” (rather than coming up with some other name for it), the anniversary can never come around on the calendar without our having to take notice of it. We continue to be held captive by this date, and therefore by the memory of the event, in a way that must please both, on the one hand, the Islamist militants who launched the attack and, on the other hand, political or business interests that benefit from Americans feeling threatened by terrorism or Islam.  (Examples: Pamela Geller. Whoever profits from the manufacture of those full-body scanners in airports.)

The anniversary made me wonder whatever became of the Park51 Islamic community center (a.k.a. the “Ground Zero mosque”). Popping online, I was surprised to learn that the center has opened, as of September 22 of last year.

Ann Hermes, Christian Science Monitor

“Amazed” would be an overstatement, but I really am very surprised (albeit pleasantly) that the center opening managed to slip under the radar–especially opening 11 days after the 10th anniversary of 9-11! I would have expected that the same people who were outraged about the center’s geographical proximity to Ground Zero would likewise have been roused by the chronological proximity.

Seth Wenig, Associated Press

Cathedral of the Madeleine

I spent last week in my old stomping grounds, Salt Lake City. While I was there, I took a colleague to Temple Square, the see of Mormonism; then we walked a couple blocks east so I could show her the Cathedral of the Madeleine, see of the Catholic diocese of Utah. It’s a gorgeous building, built at the beginning of the 20th century and adorned with colorful murals in a style I recognize but don’t know what to call: I think of it as “fin de siècle.”

Captured from utcotm.org. Click the image for a panoramic view of the cathedral interior.

I always have to chuckle at two biblical passages that adorn the front of the nave and are clearly intended to “talk back” to Mormonism. (In the image above, the biblical passages are the green squares with yellow lettering you can see toward the left and right sides of the picture.) On the west side, next to a statue of St. Peter, is a passage from the Gospel of Matthew:

Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church . . . and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

[Read: “You’re wrong, Mormons–the Catholic Church has never apostatized. Jesus said so.”]

On the east side, next to a statue of St. Paul, is this passage from the Epistle to the Galatians:

Though we or an angel from heaven preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema.

[Read: “So you might want to rethink that business about an angel bringing you a new book of scripture.”]

The apologetic messaging didn’t prevent the LDS Church from donating funds to support the restoration of the murals, as a historic treasure, in the 1990s.

[Read: “Thank you, Catholics, for this opportunity to occupy the moral high ground.”]

Synagogues turned churches

Several months ago, my husband and I were driving through Cincinnati, and we passed a building identified by its sign as the Zion Temple First Pentecostal Church. However, from the Romanesque style and the stone menorah carved on the facade, I was guessing that it had originally been a synagogue or temple.

Zion Temple First Pentecostal Church – formerly the Isaac M. Wise Center

I poked around a little online, and if the information I have is correct, this building served at the beginning of the 20th century as the Isaac M. Wise Center. It was the regular worship space for the Reform Jewish congregation that had been meeting in the famous Plum Street Temple in downtown Cincinnati, the birthplace of Reform Judaism. Once the Wise Center was built, the Plum Street Temple was used only for special occasions (the high holidays and ordination services for Hebrew Union College). In the early 1970s, the congregation moved their regular services back to Plum Street Temple and sold the Wise Center to the Pentecostals, who have been there ever since. Judging from a remark on their website, the Pentecostals are proud of the “authentic smoked stained glass windows depicting the Feast of the Passover and special celebrations of the Hebrew Nation.”

According to Queen City Survey, a blog on Cincinnati architecture, there are two other buildings on the same street that also began life as Jewish houses of worship but then passed into Christian hands. The Reading Road Temple (Sh’erith Ahabeth Achim) became New Friendship Baptist Church, and Adath Israel became Southern Baptist.

New Friendship Baptist Church – formerly the Reading Road Temple

Southern Baptist Church – formerly Adath Israel

I don’t know what it is exactly, but there’s something about this “re-purposing” of sacred spaces across religious traditions that I find intriguing. As an example of the process moving in the opposite direction–and then kind of back again–in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I did my doctorate, there was a building south of campus that began as a Bible church but became a Reconstructionist kehillah when the Bible church built a larger building elsewhere; the Reconstructionists then rented the building on Sundays to a fledgling Episcopal mission.

Chapel Hill Kehillah – formerly the Chapel Hill Bible Church