Exploring Religion and Culture1/21/2019 The church that I went to is called South Church. It is located in HartforD Connecticut and here is the link to their official website. http://scchartford.org/ . The church often has service on Sundays; there are two service time that the first period starts at 9:30 and the second period starts at 11:00. They are about one hour and 30 minutes long. The full name of the church is South Congregational Church. It belongs to the branch of Protestant in Christianity. It believes that God has given Congregational churches the authority to govern themselves and therefore it belongs directly to the Christ.
The service I went to was a special event it has for the Harvest Festival. So I think it might be a little bit different than their traditional services. The Pastor used the pumpkin as a metaphor to tell people to believe in Jesus: He took out the inside part of the pumpkin- which symbolized the sin that people have. Then, he put a small candle in- which means that Jesus can light up our world. Then, he connects the Bible with the current events that happened- about the arguments in politics. There were about 35 people who came to the service. About a half of them were African Americans; another half contained majorly Latinos and Caucasians. I think I was the only Asian person there. People had various ages: a lot of them were about 20 to 30 years old; there were some senior citizens and little kids who came with their parents. The female to male ratio was about 1:1. The church has it own band and they played a lot of good songs before the service. Then, the played more songs at the end of the service. In between, the Pastor read the Bible and had the passage presented on the screen. I noticed that a lot of people were really faithful- that they opened their arms as the band played music and shouted “yes” when Pastor said something meaningful. The service was very different than what I have experienced. I believe that I am agnostic so that it is interesting to see that people who have a religion actually believe in what they believe. It surprised me (as I mentioned), that the Pastor connected the political current event to the Bible and the religion itself- it showed the practise of the religion and how it implies to the real world. It is especially important because in that way, people are able to see the impact and engage in it.
0 Comments
NY Trip reflection:1/21/2019 a. I like The Band’s Visit, especially it’s production and how it transition from one person’s story to another. I like how that the musical portrays the similarities between the culture- represented by how the main character is able to sing some Egyptian music. The fact that two groups of people are able to have such good conversations even when they meet for the first time is really shocking to me as the Middle Eastern culture is being publicly viewed as reserved. The Middle Eastern music was really intriguing since I personally rarely heard of that kind of music. It sounds mysterious yet really emotionally provoking.
b. The UN’s visit gave me a basic understanding of how such a powerful organization works. I am really interested in international relations as well as Model UN so the tour there let me see how people worked in reality. The briefing was really informative that it provided many aspects that I did not know. For example, how small the mission group is but how large the danger is in the world. c. 2. I asked a lot of questions about the immigrants and German culture in general since they really interest me. I answered questions that the tour guide in UN asked since I knew most of the answers. However, I did not actively engage during the briefing. d. I think I definitely learned more about the immigrant life in the U.S., particularly in New York that I started to pay attention on how cultures, even immigrant cultures, which I thought would be more separate, actually intersect. For example, the German immigrants actually had a competitive relationship with Jewish immigrants and lived close to Chinese immigrants. The most important thing that I gained was that through negotiations and a series of other methods, countries, or cultures, are able to form agreements and work together or live together. Cultural conflicts do exist and result in terrible consequences. Therefore, countries help each others and that is the beauty of humanity. I think global studies have goals to understand the world and that’s how they all relate to each other. Intro to Islam1/16/2019 From the meeting, I actually learned about a lot of thing that I didn’t know before. I learned about the differences the two parts of Islam and their core beliefs. The part that Shino brought up to me and the class was quite surprising. When I asked her about what is the major thing that brought the two part into conflicts, she said that it seems to be the religious belief differences, but it might actually be an excuse and the real reason may be the fight over resources. It was a very interesting and new perspective that I didn’t not think about myself, and I think it is able to explain a lot of phenomena in the society right now.
I think I was 2 in the small group conversation. Although I didn’t talk a lot with other classmates, but I asked Shino a lot of questions. I think I got 2.5 in large discussion because I didn’t know enough background about Islam to answer the questions but I did summarise the small group discussion to the whole class. I picked the article about the two Muslim women being elected into the Congress. I think it is definitely a breakthrough and a victory for the religion and for women in general. In the talk during class, we talked about this by the end of the class about hijab and why we should embrace the culture. I think it is a great thing for the ladies to enter congress because more stereotypes will be broken and people might get to know about the Islamic culture more. |