Today is Sunday, the day we try to present a fresh look at religion in Greensboro. We've featured Friendly Baptist Church before (here); however, what we didn't mention is that it is a dynamic church with meetings, events, and practices of some sort daily. The church is alive with activity well beyond the direct preaching from the pulpit. Here we see a football team practicing on the church lawn on a very hot afternoon. Just after this sprint back to the church, the coach instructed the guys to take off their helmets and get water. He knew their limits. Two other teams were practicing in different corners of the grounds. This is a very common practice in the United States.
First we took a picture of the guys running toward the camera but decided that the message of running in the direction of the church was more powerful: Tackling religion. It is, after all, not always an easy topic to broach and we couldn't resist the play on words. Other than reading this blog, how are you spending your Sunday?
Your question. Well, in Israel Friday afternoon and Saturday are the weekend, and Sunday is the beginning of the work week.
I just now took the bus(es) into Jerusalem, to the Ben-Zvi Institute and splurged on three new books (2 guides to Jerusalem and one about the Crusader period in Israel). They extended Hebrew Book Week into a whole month, so many books were only half-price!
And lots of picture-taking on the way, of course.
Bon dimanche to you.
Posted by: Dina | Sunday, July 25, 2010 at 06:36 AM
I love your photo and your reasoning about it.
Whenever I see helmets and a church it reminds me of this great passage from Annie Dillard:
"On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return."
--Annie Dillard, _Teaching a Stone to Talk_, Harper & Row, 1982
Posted by: Dina | Sunday, July 25, 2010 at 06:39 AM