Culture Making Articles items tagged worship

The 500-year gap

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

What if you had to go to a church that had had no music since the early 1500s? It’s unimaginable. Yet the void you can’t imagine is there—[the] 500-year lack of visual arts in Protestant churches.

—Sandra Bowden, compiler of "Images of Faith"

And also with you

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Andy
: ?There are some things you can't do alone—for example, be born. There are some things you must do alone no matter how many are with you—for example, die. Then there are things you should only do alone if you have no other choice—for example, eat, laugh, and worship. Which is why the largest part of our tithe and our time goes to the Church of the Good Samaritan, Episcopal, in Paoli, Pennsylvania, where we are led into worship every week and sent out, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, "to love and serve the Lord" in the world. Tonight this sanctuary will be full of the sounds and sights of Christmas—something none of us could do in the same way by ourselves. Of all the financial gifts we give, this one is the most self-serving, since we are served and blessed by our church in so many ways. But our gifts also help pour out something costly and beautiful at the feet of Jesus, who is the reason we can give anything at all.?

Worship first, then farm

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Nate
: ?Religion, rather than agriculture, may have been the catalyst for the formation of early neolithic societies, about 11,000 years ago.?

To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.

The immensity of the undertaking at Gobekli Tepe reinforces that view. Schmidt says the monuments could not have been built by ragged bands of hunter-gatherers. To carve, erect and bury rings of seven-ton stone pillars would have required hundreds of workers, all needing to be fed and housed. Hence the eventual emergence of settled communities in the area around 10,000 years ago. “This shows sociocultural changes come first, agriculture comes later,” says Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder, who excavated Catalhoyuk, a prehistoric settlement 300 miles from Gobekli Tepe. “You can make a good case this area is the real origin of complex Neolithic societies.”

from "Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?," by Andrew Curry, Smithsonian, November 2008 :: via NYTimes.com Ideas blog