Sunday, March 23, 2008

Easter Sunday

I haven't stepped inside a church for an actual service since i was a teenager. But we thought we'd check out one since Thea has been picking up some talk of God and Jesus from daycare, both from other kids as well as from the teachers. Kel thought (rightly) that the kids will be hearing things about religion as they become more and more social, so she suggested that we may want to have a little more than a passive role in their spiritual education. To that end we planned to attend the Easter Service at All Souls Church. Thea was excited when we told her that we were doing this. And although Liam is too young to be very enthused about it, he was on board.

All Souls is a very cool Unitarian Universalist church in Northwest DC. It actually is across 16th Street from where we used to live in Adams Morgan "back in the day". I found the whole experience to be refreshingly inspiring. I heard mention of the application of a "reasoning approach" to religious faith within the first few minutes of the service. And All Souls is known for being a liberal institution with a focus on social justice. The congregation is made up of people from a wide variety of different faiths, including even agnostics and atheists.

We may attend once a month or so, possibly more, toward the goal of giving the kids a childhood experience of religion that is also appealing to us as parents; one that has a foundation of values that we can solidly get behind.

Oh yeah, and they also have a killer church organ


5 comments:

Heather Jensen said...

that's one crazy big organ! good on y'all, for trying new stuff still with yr limited spare time...

Daniel said...

This is all very interesting...and possibly important given the fact that it seems that everyone has heard about someone who grew up with nonreligious parents and then ended up joining some fundamentalist religion b/c it's the opposite of what their parents did.

TFO said...

My parents took us to church when we were younger. My K-garten was at our church. but after they had problems and then divorced we never went back. But i've always had an interest in religious/philosophical subject matter, but just from more of an academic perspective. honestly if we didn't have kids i probably wouldn't be in to it.

Daniel said...

totally interesting. I recently told one of my super religious brothers that I didn't believe in god. I think clearing that up will help our relationship.

Mike Golch said...

that is one impressive Church.