How to Be A Perfect Stranger (6th Edition)

Description

These easy-to-use guidebooks help the well-meaning guest of any other faith feel at ease, participate to the fullest extent possible, and avoid violating anyone's religious principles or hurting their feelings. Not a guide to theology. Not presented from the perspective of any particular faith.

What will happen? What do I do? What do I wear? What do I say? When is it OK to leave? What should I avoid doing, wearing, or saying? What are their basic beliefs? Should I bring a gift? These are just a few of the basic, very practical questions answered in How to Be a Perfect Stranger, two books that belong in every living room, library, and office. Originally published in hardcover by Jewish Lights Publishing, these updated and expanded trade paperback editions now include information for the Canadian branches of each faith, plus an added chapter on the largest Protestant denomination in Canada, The United Church of Canada.

VOL.1: How to Be a Perfect Stranger is based on information obtained from authorities of each religion. Assemblies of God; Baptist; Buddhist; The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ); Churches of Christ; Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist); Episcopalian and Anglican; Greek Orthodox; Hindu; Islam; Jehovah's Witnesses; Jewish; Lutheran; Methodist; Mormon (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints); Presbyterian; Quaker (Religious Society of Friends); Roman Catholic; Seventh-day Adventist; United Church of Canada; United Church of Christ.

Sujets

• Comparative Religion
• Philosophie et théologie
• Reference
• Etiquette
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 19 février 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781594735943
• Langue: English

Extrait

Books in the “Perfect Stranger” Series
How to Be a Perfect Stranger , 6th Edition: The Essential Religious Etiquette Handbook
The Perfect Stranger’s Guide to Funerals and Grieving Practices: A Guide to Etiquette in Other People’s Religious Ceremonies
The Perfect Stranger’s Guide to Wedding Ceremonies: A Guide to Etiquette in Other People’s Religious Ceremonies
Other SkyLight Paths Books on Interfaith Relations
Christians & Jews in Dialogue: Learning in the Presence of the Other
Christians & Jews—Faith to Faith: Tragic History, Promising Present, Fragile Future
Getting to the Heart of Interfaith: The Eye-Opening, Hope-Filled Friendship of a Pastor, a Rabbi & an Imam
Practical Interfaith: How to Find Our Common Humanity as We Celebrate Diversity
Religion Gone Astray: What We Found at the Heart of Interfaith



Contents
Foreword by Rev. Dr. Joan Brown Campbell
Preface by Sanford Cloud, Jr., Former President, The National Conference for Community and Justice
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The “Everything You Need to Know Before You Go” Checklist
1 ·African American Methodist Churches
2 ·Assemblies of God
3 ·Bahá’í Faith
4 ·Baptist
5 ·Buddhist
6 ·Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
7 ·Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist)
8 ·Churches of Christ
9 ·Episcopalian/Anglican
10 ·Hindu
11 ·Islam
12 ·Jehovah’s Witnesses
13 ·Jewish
14 ·Lutheran
15 ·Mennonite/Amish
16 ·Methodist
17 ·Mormon (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)
18 ·Native American/First Nations
19 ·Orthodox Churches
20 ·Pentecostal Church of God
21 ·Presbyterian
22 ·Quaker (Religious Society of Friends)
23 ·Reformed Church in America/Canada
24 ·Roman Catholic
25 ·Seventh-day Adventist
26 ·Sikh
27 ·Unitarian Universalist
28 ·United Church of Canada
29 ·United Church of Christ
Glossary of Common Religious Terms and Names
The Meanings of Popular Religious Symbols
Calendar of Religious Holidays and Festivals
Summary of Proper Forms for Addressing Leaders of Various Faith
Copyright
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Foreword
The religious landscape of North America has been in flux to one degree or another since the arrival of the first Europeans to these shores. Despite this, the cultural consciousness of North American people was largely Protestant Christian until fairly recently. However, from about the middle of the 20th century, the rate of change and diversification of religious affiliation within the United States and Canada has increased appreciably. Today, any residual sense of North America as a religious monolith has been dispelled even in small towns and throughout the countryside.
In the United States, for example, about 92 percent of our citizens profess a belief in God, and the nation continues to reflect one of the highest rates of religious affiliation among industrialized countries. The confluence of recent immigration patterns and a growing awareness among North Americans of world religions has helped produce in our country today a more open and vital attitude toward all faiths.
In an earlier era, those who practiced a faith other than the Protestant or Roman Catholic traditions of Christianity often did so in relative obscurity. Today, the vigorous religious rites and customs of a host of faiths take place in full public view. This reality, which is the manifestation of the venerable North American right to free exercise of religions, is a national treasure of great worth.
The great North American experiment in a pluralistic republic democracy is well served by the growing religious pluralism and the diversity of our people. It is freshly infused in each generation as new people bring their religious and cultural legacy to the workplace, the public square and their newly founded houses of worship, reinvigorating our land and our sense of the holy.
How to Be a Perfect Stranger provides all North Americans with an inviting point of entry into the world of religious pluralism. As we become more comfortable with the ways in which others pray, marry, bury and celebrate, we can move more effectively toward a sense of our single yet diverse peoplehood. Although we are diverse racially, religiously and culturally, we are united by principles and ideals that celebrate our very differences.
How to Be a Perfect Stranger equips each of us to enter into the religious realm of our neighbors. By providing us with practical information concerning what to bring, where to sit or stand, when to participate and when to refrain from participating, this volume serves as a great encouragement for all of us to know the faith traditions of each other, and to help erode the walls of ignorance that too often separate or confuse us. By bringing us out of our respective religious communities, each of which has a tendency to be more insular than we might like, How to Be a Perfect Stranger can help us appreciate and know the vast variety of our religious voices. Together, these voices create an extraordinary choir of ritual and celebration, piety and devotion, faith and resilience that is truly part of the bedrock of our nation.
Schools, businesses, public libraries and libraries in churches, synagogues and mosques will want to have a copy of How to Be a Perfect Stranger on hand, a volume that can reap big dividends during celebrations of our quintessential North American right of religious liberties.
Rev. Dr. Joan Brown Campbell


Preface
The truism that 11:00 on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in North American life does not refer to race only. For most people, religious practice is an exercise in the familiar. Those of us who participate in congregational worship and observance—and many do in Canada and the United States, the most religiously observant nations in the industrialized West—do so with people who live like us, look like us and pretty much think and believe like us. So while white Americans and black Americans, for example, do not, as a rule, worship together in large numbers, neither do evangelical and liberal Lutherans, Satmar and Lubavitcher Hasidim, Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Let alone Jews and Presbyterians, or Greek Orthodox and Quakers, or Methodists and Buddhists.
The vitality experienced in these communities is usually enjoyed in isolation: Faith communities in North America often don’t have much to do with each other. Many North Americans live in geographic, cultural, economic and social isolation from one another and are ill-­prepared to speak honestly across racial, religious and cultural lines. To them, others’ ways are strange ways.
Yet, a sense of estrangement is not necessarily a stranger to religious tradition. For example, the earliest writings at the core of the Abrahamic religions—Islam, Christianity and Judaism—use the experience of otherness and isolation from other religious traditions as a pretext to reflect on being strangers in strange lands. Little wonder, then, that many religions exalt the stranger and offer numerous spiritual injunctions about the obligations of hospitality, the right of protection and the general caution, expressed in one form or another, to take care with strangers “lest,” as the Christian saint Paul wrote in his letter to the Hebrews (13:2), “we entertain angels unawares.”
If the ancient wisdom suggests caution, contemporary circumstances suggest urgency. Indeed, the publication of How to Be a Perfect Stranger comes at a time when the airwaves and radio talk shows are dominated by those who would use religious faith as a cover for intolerance, who exploit eternal truths for short-term political gain and who cynically use the spark of faith to ignite culture wars and divide North America into bickering camps.
Having seen how religion can be abused, it is up to us, as citizens, to step out of our isolated communities and into dialogue with those different from ourselves if we are ever to reach the common ground that defines us as citizens, parents, neighbors and human beings. For shared values can get us past the superficial barriers of language and skin color to catch a glimpse, however fleeting, of the spirit that exists in equal measure in all people. Only around those shared values can we hope to find solutions to many of the problems vexing society as a whole.
For understanding to increase, our differences need not disappear. But they must be understood before we come to know that the values we share are far greater in number and importance than any real or perceived differences. Without that understanding, perception threatens to become reality. Unless we find new ways to talk to each other, we’ll be left talking about each other. And we know where that can lead us.
It’s time we stopped ignoring the racial, ethnic, cultural and religious fault lines that divide us and our experiences and start finding the way forward for all communities. How to Be a Perfect Stranger makes that task seem much more doable and much less daunting. Here, presented in clear, direct prose, are the kind of social, cultural and logistical nuts and bolts you would expect to find in traveler’s guides if congregations were your ports of call instead of, say, the island nations of the South Pacific.
How to Be a Perfect Stranger is a conscientious labor in the service of intergroup understanding. It expresses as few sermons could fundamental convictions about the value of all creation. It especially conveys truths about thos