I lift up mine eyes

Our soon to be new neighborhood is veritably awash with religious institutions. Out the window we'll see the Riverside Church and Union Theological Seminary (where the wondrous ceiling at right is to be found), up the block is the Jewish Theological Seminary, and around the corner from Riverside the so-called "God Box" where a gaggle of religious non-profits are based. And that's just looking south and west!

Water towers of 11th Street

Noticed some unfamiliar shadows on the very familiar yellow 12th Street part of The New School out my 11th Street office window this morning before class. After a little while I saw that it was the shadow of the water tower atop the building next to mine. New York's iconic water towers found me two more times, today. The first time was when I stumbled across a booklet I'd put together for an early iteration of "Religious Geography of New York," to help convey the piecemeal way in which religious and other buildings change in the city. (You can mix and match from several sacred and secular designs.)And then, walking along 13th Street to University Place, I noticed that half the block on my right was missing. (I was dismayed that I couldn't recall anything that had been there before...) And lo: peering down across the temporary opening was another 11th Street water tower.

Renaissance on Prospect Place

Did I ever mention there was a church on my block? Not a church building, but a community worshipping in the parlor floor of the brownstones. It was a Haitian Baptist Church, and on Wednesdays and 

Sundays a van brought its most ancient members to worship. Well, they're gone. Someone new has moved in - painted over the old sign in white and put up a banner. Francophone yields to Hispanophone...

Little cathedral around the corner

The Roman Catholic church I see out my kitchen window, St. Joseph's, has become a co-cathedral. It's been through a restoration and is now surely one of the most splendid religious spaces in Brooklyn. I'll go back soon with a better camera, but these snaps should give you a sense. Surrounding the altar, a row of life-sized (well, human sized) angels in an array of colored robes. They're a little androgynous, all white. 
But from either side one is bathed by images of the Virgin Mary appearing to folks around the world - the New World is of course well represented. But one is also Chinese, looking a lot like Guanyin - she was too bright for my cell phone camera, so here are the Korean and Filipina ones.
As you leave the church you see two enormous murals, Our Ladies of Lourdes on the right and Fatima on the left. Embedded within the latter is a vision of genocide and the destruction of war, and two men in white: one looks to be John Paul II, the man in glasses may be Maximilian Kolbe. [or Oscar Romero?] Saints alive!

Through new eyes

While at the Studio Museum of Harlem, I also saw a wonderful exhibit of photographs taken by high school students inspired by the museum's collections. These two stunners explicitly address the religious experience of teenagers. They're called "The After-Life" and "Religion Dior." I've written to the museum to convey my admiration to the photographer - and to inquire if there are more where these came from.

Prospect Heights masjid

Exploring some of the less developed parts of Prospect Heights to see the studios of artists (thanks to the Brooklyn Museum's GoBrooklynArt program) I happened on a new mosque just blocks from my home.

Starstruck

Went with my Lived Religion in New York class to the Eldridge Street Museum and Synagogue - first time I've been to this gorgeous place, an old favorite, since the installation of a window by Kiki Smith. The window was huge, bathing the place in morning light, but - especially from the gallery, where you saw how it drew on the existing colors and décor of the synagogue, it's glorious. ( Picture source.)

Dreaming spires

Waiting in front of the too popular ramen shop Ippudon (we ended up going elsewhere, the wait was too long), caught this lovely glimpse of Grace Church's near Salisburian fineness in dialogue with an old water tower (or is it a Shaun Tanian Lost Thing?), in the last sun of the day.

(Meanwhile, back in Brooklyn,

they've had a little snow: picture above by my ex-student D. Below a gorgeous pic from the Times of snowy windswept Brooklyn, seen from Manhattan's East Side. Once it was known as the "City of Churches."

Advent

First Sunday of Advent - and third day of the Christmas shopping season! Because the subway was wonky I got to see an uneasy coupling of God and mammon today, a church/marketplace. A favorite topic in my Religious Geography of New York class, the erstwhile Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion, shuttered as Chelsea lost interest in religion, had become a nightclub called the Limelight (later Avalon). Now it's a cramped boutique shopping center called the Limelight Marketplace.
The stained glass (at unexpected eye-level or below) looks on in bemused bewilderment.

Lost its mojo?

Went today to one of the jewels of religious architecture of New York, the gothic revival Episcopal Church of Saint Ann and the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn Heights. (Like many a neogothic church it has lost its spire over the years.) On a radiant November morning, the somewhat gaudy stained glass windows (apparently the "first set of figural stained glass windows ever made in North America" and considered the finest early 19th century stained glass in the United States) bathe each other in color, islands of blurred brilliance in an otherwise grandly somber setting. If only the life on the church floor were as lively! At their 11 o'clock - their only - Sunday service, there weren't more than a few dozen people, spread out shyly among the carved wooden pews. Mainline Protestantism in decline, I thought. And: Like Europe! I had to wince when the Priest-in-Charge (an interrim), in the midst of a sermon on leadership in and outside the church, mentioned the kinds of leadership books you could find on the tables at Barnes & Noble and added wryly that her "personal favorite" was Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back If You Lose It.

Brick testament

Went to the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea - nearly a museum, really - for their deeply moving show of late Monets, and on the way noticed a feature of my old friend, the Church of the Guardian Angel, I had managed to overlook before. (This might even be its namesake, I suppose!)

Primavera

Scenes
worthy
of
Assisi
in
the
Spring!
But
it's
just
recently
renovated
St. John
Nepomucene
at
66th
and
First Ave.,
and a
pinking
tree in
Brooklyn.

Fall colors

Beautiful autumnal day! I started in familiar territory, though unfamiliar on a weekend - to school for our Fall Open House for prospective students. Jefferson Market Public Library was looking as splendid as ever as one of its attendant trees starts to turn. And sitting on the stage of our auditorium, a futurist folly from 1930, I noticed it's garish orange actually makes from some lovely effects. Up then to Central Park, in gorgeous color. But I was there because a friend had told me that the hundreds of trees blown down by a freak storm in August were being turned into mountains of wood chips. It's true. And then, since I was in the neighborhood, up to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, passing the crazy statue in the peace garden next door, and then dazzled by the light of the stained glass bathing the newly cleaned white stone columns inside in opulent jewel colors.

Openings and closings

This is the weekend of one of the City's funnest events, Open House New York - all sorts of places ordinarily closed to the public are open for viewing. I didn't have time to do too much this time, but I did peek into the First Baptist Church at 79th and Broadway, home of the nearly aniconic stained glass above. (The whole place was once lit by glass of this kind - a kind of crystal cathedral for 1895 - but persistent leaks led them to cover the glass ceiling with Spanish tiles; now it's dark.) But the coolest view was an opening of another kind: St James' Church through the temporary opening of a building site. Between these two is Central Park, Manhattan's most beloved opening.

Holiday weekend

In Theorizing Religion today, students described their experiences attending a religious festival: I'd given them four options to research and visit, all of which happened to fall this past weekend: the start of Sharad Navaratri (Hindu), Eid-al-Fitr (Muslim), Rosh Hashanah (Jewish), and the feast of San Gennaro (Catholic). Finding a place to witness one of these festivals was part of the assignment, as was writing an account of what they found and what they made of it.

What they came up with is wonderful! A Polish Catholic girl, unable to attend other festivals because of her work schedule, is invited to celebrate a festive Rosh Hashanah dinner with the family of a Russian Jewish co-worker, though she's warned "we're not very religious anymore." Two boys attend a Hindu community celebration in a tiny room; as some pujatis convulse on the floor, one student is unnerved, and the other is surprised to find a "pure form" of the "spirit" he now thinks animates all religion. Many students go to the San Gennaro Festival in Little Italy and are disgusted or discouraged by its commercialism; people they ask about the religious significance of it know little, but one student makes it past the food vendors and freak shows to the Church of the Most Precious Blood, where he finds the painted plaster statue of the saint fluttering with taped-on dollar bills; another student discerns a religious love animating even the tackiest street events. A girl who interns for an organization helping South Asians is told about Eids and Navaratris past by people she meets, and then is treated to dinner at a Pakistani place by a taxi driver - he has neither time nor family to celebrate Eid himself, so offering it to her is his Eid celebration.

These are just some of what students found - several managed to visit two festivals! My intention in assigning these visits (besides making up for the class time missed because of my trip to Berlin!) was to get students out of the classroom, into the city, to confront major religious traditions in their sometimes appealing, sometimes vulgar festival garb. A "reality check" for the theories we're discussing in class - do they really apply to anything but academic constructions of religion? I also wanted them to feel the complex energies of the festivities and wonder if they were really "religious," and to start to think about festival "higher time" and the power of community celebration, topics we'll take up in a few weeks. Seems to have worked!

Repeating cycle

Took one of my two Religious Geography of New York classes on a field trip to Eldridge Street today. Our ostensible destination was the Museum at Eldridge Street, the recently restored landmark synagogue with the lovely chandelier at right (see the stars of David?), but my purpose was actually more ambitious. A few weeks ago we spent a good amount of time making sense of a map of the early 20th century Jewish Lower East Side from Eric Homberger's Historical Atlas of New York (below) which shows several shuls (synagogues) on each block of tenements. Theses weren't buildings, but just rooms in apartments. The Eldridge Street Synagogue was the first purpose-built synagogue - indeed, as our docent guide told us today, nobody knew what such a large Jewish house of worship was supposed to look like, neither the Presbyterian architects nor the poor Eastern European congregation! Now anyone can tell you that Eldridge Street's Jewish life is long past - the street's so full of Chinese stores that it's used in film shoots! But what you need your professor of religion for is to show you that the story is repeating itself. There are no purpose-built Chinese houses of worship yet, though there are many adapted buildings. But if you know to look for them, you'll find the neighborhood is crammed with religious places - like the tiny Pure Land Buddhist temple advertised by the yellow sign at left - making a home in the same inhospitable tenements.

Changing LES

Was down on the Lower East Side this evening to see the college's Spring theater production - Shakespeare's "Tempest," directed wonderfully by my friend C, and starring lots of students I know - and noticed some interesting views along the way (not quite religious geography but almost). The block of Eldridge Street where the synagogue is was just cleaning up after a movie shoot, for which someone had gone all out for the Chinatown look: red lanterns, a dragon dance, and lots of fireworks and shiny confetti. A few blocks away sits a Buddhist temple, 正覚寺 (I don't know how it's pronounced), on whose roof stupa there's graffiti which might be a mystical Sanskrit character, I suppose! And a good few blocks beyond that (Norfolk St.) is what was clearly once a church, then clearly a synagogue, and now evidently abandoned. (It's Beth Hamedrash Hagadol, I learn from the Web, the Eastern European orthodox congregation from which the founders of Eldridge Street split; it seems to have closed just last year as its numbers dwindled to 20. (For images of the inside, see the slideshow in this article from the New York Sun.)