...On March 25th, 2018, I attended a Catholic church service at Immaculate Conception Parish church in Fairbank, Iowa. The church service that I attended was on Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday is the last Sunday of Lent, and it is also the first day of Holy Week. The Palm Sunday service included the passing out of palm leaves to the congregation. The Palm leaves symbolize Jesus’ arrival into Jerusalem because people of his time offered them as sort of a welcoming path into their city. A practice that I found interesting from the Palm Sunday service was the fact that the Palm leaves could not be thrown away. After asking, I learned that the leaves had been blessed, so instead of throwing them away, the church kept and burned them to use as the ashes...
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...4. What has been your experience with the Catholic Church? The church itself is extremely important to me! I I have always had a positive experience with the church. I have always been involved with the church through youth group and also being an altar server for many years. I grew up in a Catholic home, so we always went to mass on Sundays and were involved with the church. You have so many positive role models from the church. Fr. Ray had a huge impact on my faith life and was a great role model. He took me to many dinners and activities throughout the diocese. It was great to be involved in the church at such a young age. I am grateful for being born into a Catholic home. In high school I was also extremely involved through the youth group....
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...RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE Religious Background I come from a Catholic family. Since I remember, Sunday has always being the day dedicated specifically to God. We attend mass almost every Sunday. For this religious experience paper, I decided to attend a Seventh-day Adventist Church. I chose to explore this denomination because I was curious to know why they observe Saturdays instead of Sundays as Catholics do. Adventists hold some similar beliefs as many Catholics such as the Trinity, Christ’s divinity, the virgin birth, a physical resurrection of the dead, and Christ’s Second Coming (Brom). However, they believe that the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon, the Pope is the Antichrist; in the last days, Sunday worship will be “the mark of the beast”; and that the soul sleeps between death and resurrection (Brom). Ideas Gained through this Experience At the moment I entered their temple, I started noticing differences. I felt everyone was looking at me, as if they knew that was my first time attending their church. Some of the differences I discovered between the Seventh-day Adventist and the Catholic Church are the following: the Adventist Church does not have any images of God, Jesus, Saints or Virgin Mary; all women wear dresses or long skirts, no one had jeans or pants, they do not wear jewelry either; Adventists start their service at 9am and finish at around 2pm, while Catholic masses only last one hour; their pastor wears a regular suit; Adventists take their Bible...
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...Immersion Experience with the Baptist Church CNS 6565-10 Multicultural Foundations Winter 2015 Immersion Experience with the Baptist Church Of the fifty four churches located in Hinesville, Georgia the Baptist Church has thirteen churches located throughout the town. The purpose of selecting the Baptist Church Sunday service was to examine how Sunday services differ from the Sunday services at a Catholic Mass and to increase the cultural awareness of the Baptist Services and to explore why one member of its congregation chose this particular church over the other twelve Baptist churches available. Description of Activities On 1 March, 2015, The First Calvary Missionary Baptist Church was visited for its Sunday service. The church was full with almost every seat taken. A majority of the church members were African American. There were also two Hispanic families and three Caucasian families. The order of the church was praise and worship, choir singing, devotional services, church covenant, welcome and announcements, song selection, tithes/offering/benevolent, scriptures from the bible, hymn’s of worship, the sermon delivered by the pastor, altar call, invitation to discipleship, communion and benediction. The service was three hours long. It included many songs song by the choir in between each order. The orders of welcome and announcements, sermon delivered by the pastor, communion and benediction were each approximately forty minutes long with the...
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...history of Catholic Moral Theology, we have had to deal with the topic of what can and cannot change within the Catholic Church. This happened to be the title of the primary book that we used for this course. This book, by John T. Noonan, is entitled A Church That Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching. A theme which Noonan immediately focuses on throughout the book is one which touches many of us deeply, slavery. As a person who has studied both law and religion and who is now embarking on a study of moral theology & ethics, I was highly interested in reading what John T. Noonan a distinguished scholar -author and member of the U.S. Court of Appeals- had to say in such an arena. Having heard him lecture, I was interested to see how his viewpoint translated into this type of arena. I was not disappointed. Throughout our course we not only discussed how this work dealt with such a topic, but we also discussed our own viewpoints on this very topic. Within the following paper I will discuss the issue of slavery, in the form of a synthetic paper, and how not only how it has evolved, but also the various positions the church has had concerning such an issue. As a backdrop, I will also use what Noonan outlined in his book as well. Therefore, this paper will be in the form of a review of Noonan thoughts (which will utilize various points from my prior presentation on this topic)/synthetic paper on the issue of slavery within the Catholic Church...
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...Community assignment, the place of worship that I chose to attend was the non-denominational church, Real Life. Being a non-denominational establishment, means that they do consider themselves Christians without determining which branch Christianity they belong to. Basically, they worship god and accept anyone who does the same. Since I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, it was quite a different experience. When I first arrived I was immediately greeted by several people welcoming me to the church and asking me if I needed help finding my way around. I was very surprised by the amount of hospitality these people presented themselves with, because typically in a Catholic church everyone sort of sticks to themselves. Everyone was dressed in a different manner, in everything from gym clothes to a work uniform, the message portrayed in this was come as you are. “Sunday’s best” was paid no mind in this church. The room was an auditorium type set up with a huge big screen projector allowing everyone in the building to clearly see the pastor. There were no pews, no statues, no crosses, no deacons, no priest, instead, a band came out and started playing up-beat lively music. The people at the church really got into the music. Everyone was singing and dancing to the songs, and this went on for a good twenty minutes. This is much different from what I am used to because at the Catholic Church, the music is extremely traditional and is sung by a choir. It used to open the mass,...
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...I had the chance to attend a Catholic wedding at St. Michaels Catholic church. I had never been to a wedding before.I was very anxious to experience this ceremony.Wedding always look so beautiful and full of love in the movies.On my way to the church,i thought to myself "It would be interesting if an ex boyfriend would come and stop the ceremony,just to make it even more interesting." When I arrived at the church, I quickly found a seat in the back so I could see the bride coming in before everyone else. I hadn't been in a church in a very long time and I didn't remember what it was like.The sanctuary was nothing like what I was imagined it to be. It was dark and everyone was extremely quiet. It reminded me of the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding.It was a dark church with a lot of loud family members.A lot of the women were wearing black,not because they were mourning the marriage,but because dominican women do everything to look thiner for special events.If it was not for the obvious wedding decorations and the loud couples you would think it was a ceremony for the dead. When the wedding started, a woman began playing the organ. The bride walked down the aisle to the usual with her divorced parents.The tradition is usually for the father of the bride to walk a bride down the aisle,but like every other self centered hispanic mother, she insisted that she be included.The ceremony was two hours long,but it felt like forever. My favorite part was when the couple...
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...Catholicism is more wide spread. The American city I was born in, San Francisco, CA, has a very rich and vast Catholic community. Initially, the early Catholic communities were comprised of early Irish Americans that settled on the western part of the United States. In the mid to late 1800s several other American immigrant nationalities relocated to western cities like San Francisco, sharing the same Roman Catholic Church beliefs, and practices. From Seattle, WA down to Los Angeles, CA there were several Catholic churches founded by German, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Mexican American communities. The Mexican American community consisted of primarily Mexicans that lived in then Mexican states prior to the Mexican American war in the 1840s. This westward immigration of Catholic communities was also closely followed by the immigration of Asian Americans, and the growth of African-American Catholic communities. Chinese Americans made up most of the Asian Catholic community, as they worked on the westward expansion of the railroads. When Chinese American Catholics Migrated to the west coast they were not met with the embracement that most would say the Catholic religion embodies today. Steven M. Avella describes these events in his short book Catholicism On The Pacific: Building a Regional Scaffolding writing, “This engagement was not always happy as many Irish Catholics participated in anti-Chinese movements (e.g., the Kearneyites of...
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...Applying Concepts At Mass The service I attended was at St. Mary’s Catholic Church on the corner of South Fifth Avenue and Ann Street in Wilmington, NC. I went there on March 27, 2011 at 11:00 am. St. Mary’s Catholic Church is a post-Vatican II parish of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Raleigh. The Mass I attended celebrated the Third Sunday in Lent. As I entered the Church, the priest, Father Bob, was standing at the door greeting people. As I was looking around in the lobby, Father Bob noticed I was not a regular and approached me. He was very kind and eager to answer questions. He handed me the Church’s newsletter and an Order of Mass. The building was a large brick building. It is a Spanish Baroque style structure with no wood beams, framing, or nails. It is constructed of only bricks and tile. Ground was broken for the church on May 20, 1908 and the first mass held there was on December 17, 1911. The Roman Catholic Church is based in Christianity and is a theistic religion. In greater detail it is a monotheistic religion. There are many hierophanies in the Catholic Church. An example of a sacred place would be the church itself. An example of a sacred person would be the priest or Father Bob at St. Mary’s. Also in the Catholic Church Saints and Popes would be regarded as very sacred people. The mass I attended was during the sacred time of Lent, which is a forty day period. The Catholic Church is not iconoclastic at all. At St. Mary’s there were multiple depictions of the...
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...Georges Orthodox Cathedral in Oakland for this paper. St Georges is a Greek Orthodox Church that has service in both English and Arabic because there is a large Syrian community that attends the church. The church itself is fairly small, but has plenty of iconography of holy figures all over the walls and ceiling. The service at the Orthodox church had some similarities to my experience at a Catholic church, but there were many differences as well. Upon walking in to the church service, everyone already there was standing and listening to the all-men choir sing. The churchgoers seemed to be immersed in the song as they stood waiting for the service to start. The interaction of the individuals in the church was intriguing to witness. Many people knew other and would stop to socialize briefly when they saw one another. Having...
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...a Roman Catholic diocese in Albany on 40 N Main Ave. To open the Roman Catholic faith has always been intriguing to me, and this assignment gave me a reason to explore it more. Growing up in a Christian faith, I have known the tenants of Christianity. The first thing that really impressed on me in attending mass was the beauty of the church itself. It is clear that much care is placed in maintaining the simple elegance of the church. Inside the church are stained glass windows. The main window was a depiction Jesus on the cross. Many smaller windows showed different Apostles and Saints. There were several square wood carvings lining the walls along the sides of the church. A practitioner next to me told me that they were the stages of the cross, and used by Catholics to help them focus on particular prayers. The mass itself was a memorable experience for me. I really enjoyed the singing and the message by the priest out of the books of Isaiah and Mark. The order of events was similar to my own church, but there was a lot of kneeling, and recited prayers and creeds that the entire congregation participated in. I must say that coming from a background that sees church as a very relaxed affair, there was something very nice about the ritual and recitation of the prayers and creeds. I participated and tried to follow along with everything. I found these rituals helped me to put myself in a place of true worship and reflection. The ritual and acts the Catholic Church performs...
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...Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience Uncommon Faithfulness is a collection of essays of the experience of African American Catholics. The book was written by fourteen black Catholic theologians, ecclesial leaders and scholars at a conference held at the University of Notre Dame in 2004. Uncommon Faithfulness was edited by M. Shawn Copeland who serves as the Adjunct Professor of Theology at the Institute for black Catholic studies at Xavier University in New Orleans Louisiana. Catholics of African descent maintained their faith and inspiration to sustain resistance against oppression of slavery and to create life giving opportunities. This was nearly 450 years of Uncommon Faithfulness. The phrase “Uncommon Faithfulness” describes the black Catholic experience in the United States. There are a total of fourteen essays. The first five essays deals with the history of black Catholics in the United States; including essays about African American women in religious communities and black Catholics during the civil rights movement in the United States. The next five essays deals with theological and ethnical aspects of the black Christian experience. There are many challenges that reflect the black Catholic community that allowed African ancestors to endure the denial of their humanity. Despite oppression conditions they were able to exercise their full humanity and were able to create new institutions and cultural traditions by thinking past custom beliefs...
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...an 8:30am Classic Divine Worship Service at the First Lutheran Church of Gainesville. This service was quite different from my typical evening Sunday Mass at St. Augustines Catholic Church. I have only ever attended a Catholic service and I was excited to experience a new religious service. The reason I chose a Lutheran Church was because I have always been curious about this particular religion. Some of my friends are Lutheran and I wanted to see what the church was all about. In this paper I will argue that by attending this Lutheran Service I was able to visualize different symbols, participate in different rituals and experiences, listen to the leader and members of the church, and understand the purpose of the Lutheran Church and their relation to America as a larger society....
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...raised in the Catholic Church. I went to Catholic school from grade school through high school. I feel my parents did a great job in raising me in the Catholic Church. They were very involved in the church community and I feel that help me not understand the church teachings but also help give me a sense of belonging in the church as well. The church I grew up in was a very old gothic style church built in the mid 1800’s in Cleveland Ohio. It was one of the first Catholic Churches built in the city of Cleveland, and is a Polish church built mainly by Polish immigrants who came here during the height of the immigration movement. I feel one of the main reasons that made my church experience growing up was that the church was not only a staple of the community but it also help me with having an appreciation for my Polish heritage. My great grandparents where the first to be active members and attended this church, and the rest of my family from my grandparents, parents, and my brother, sister, and me followed in their footsteps. I think having a strong family history and background in a church community helps let you know where your place in the church is. I feel my experiences I had in my church growing up were very unique and maybe different from most people because I am not sure many people can say they belonged to the same church as the great grandparents, grandparents, and parents, and attend the same school as they did. I think that is a very neat experience to have and...
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...Cultural immersion involves integrating yourself into a new place that is not familiar to you. Integrating yourself into a new culture does not take a lot of work it just requires someone to interact in a setting that is not familiar to them as well as experience new things. Although I have Catholic beliefs I do not actually practice the religion. This is why I chose to immerse myself into the Catholic Church for this project. I chose to visit the Catholic Church St. Michael’s in Long Branch, I went to the 4 pm mass on Ash Wednesday as well as the 9 am mass on the following Sunday with my roommate who is a devote Catholic. I chose to “culture-watch” in a Catholic Church because I have never sat through a full mass but I do believe the religion...
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