- 06/02/2013
- Posted by: essay
- Category: Free essays
The article by Diana L. Eck tells that there are problems in relationships between religions. Such problems are nearly everywhere; in such countries as India, Yugoslavia and even in the United States of America.
Several worldwide interfaith organizations named the year of 1993 the “Year of Interreligious Understanding” in the honor of one hundred anniversary of the World’s Parliament of Religions, which was held in Chicago in 1893. The year of 1993 brought that little evidence of the interreligious understanding which the world so badly needed.
However in April in Sharon, something fundamentally new happened. New shovels were stuck in the ground of an old farm, because the ground was meant to be for a New England Islamic Center.
As Rabbi Starr told, Sharon is a place where people of different confessions can live together in harmony and peace. And exactly these things America should spread all over the world.
In the past, people of Islamic community had the only place to gather – New England’s first mosque in Quincy.
The Sri Lakshmi temple is for sure the largest temple of New England, but there are also Hindu temples in Stow and Lowell, where dozens of Indian-American regional groups get together for Hindu religious holidays.
The Muslim population is growing now all over the world. Boston is known for more than 25 Buddhist communities. There are some communities of Euro-American Buddhists.
Nowadays Providence and Cambridge have Zen centers; Cambridge and Barre have Vipassana medication centers and also there are some Tibetan centers which are situated from Newbury Street to Newton. There are also several new Buddhist communities of immigrants. There are a lot of centers and communities in Boston, such as: Zoroastrian association of Greater Boston, Vedanta Center and Baha’i Center.
Boston shows the religiously diverse of the peoples from the whole world. The diversity of it touches not only Jews, Muslims and Christian, but representatives of other religions.
Christians, Jews and Muslims, who gathered together under a huge tent in April 1993, admit that it was a great and important beginning; it was the first in their lives.
All of them, one by one, the representatives of the different religious communities stood in the centre of the tent and spoke about their hopes for the future of the community.
I agree with the author of the article, that it was unique and wonderful challenge. I am sure that the religious difference shouldn’t divide people but rather be the occasion for all of us to know one another. That event in 1993 for sure sat a new tone for interreligious relations.
Work Cited
Eck, Diana L. The Religious Melting Pot in Boston. Boston Globe. (April 10, 1993).
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