131–140 of 171 posts
Mosques are thriving.
And this is bad how? I live in a German population center with many many mosques and it affects me in exactly zero ways. I know _no one_ who regularly visits a mosque, let alone trying to convince others to join. We have religious freedom in our constitution. Aside from some stupidly minor exceptions, Germans aren't somehow converting to Islam. They are leaving religion in general .
Great article, but I think it misses one key aspect of why monasteries are dying out: the lack of lively church communities which used to encourage dedicated people to join the monastic life. Monasteries don't exist in a vacuum, they have an intricate interdependency with normal parishes of families and, more generally, people "in the world." It should not really be the responsibility of monastics to do public relati…
Wasn't it the case that a lot of second sons became monks because they weren't going to inherit the family title/land/business/farm, and they had to find some way to survive? For the upper classes, monasteries were replaced by militaries, when second sons could go off and have adventures, and perhaps win a fortune of their own. For everyone else, the advent of wage economies did the job.
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Wasn't it the case that a lot of second sons became monks because they weren't going to inherit the family title/land/business/farm, and they had to find some way to survive? For the upper classes, monasteries were replaced by militaries, when second sons could go off and have adventures, and perhaps win a fortune of their own. For everyone else, the advent of wage economies did the job.
There were and are many reasons why people became monastics. But to think that the only reasons were inheritance and property laws shows that someone only knows about monasticism from the perspective of modern medieval histories, which tend to present it this way. Not to deny that these reasons existed and made many consider monastic life as an option, but it can't be the whole story. Think about it, monastic life re…
First, monks were not the only men to live and work in monasteries. There were many "sub-ranks" (for instance "frère convers" in French, someone that shared most of their life without taking the religious vow) as well as external workers (for centuries, many monasteries had vast domains where monks ruled over peasants, at various degrees).
Then, becoming a monk was a social ascension for many. This was still true a few decades ago. My peasant grand-mother had ten children over twenty years, and the only ones who did not stop their studies early, were the three boys who wanted to become priests. The will to study and to change their way of life was a strong incentive. Times changed, and they all found other ways.
The Concent of Saunt Leibniz. We can try turning old monasteries into concents à la Neal Stephenson's Anathem. People can go for a year in a unarian math to just study. Maybe a four consecutive years in such a math get equivalent recognition to a university degree. Whether it is the traditional monastic discipline or the Cartasian discipline, the required basic infrastructure is probably similar. Jeejahs stay outside…
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> The idea of a monastery is to dedicate yourself completely to introspection and philosophy (...) no matter what religion or philosophy No, the idea of a monastery is to dedicate yourself completely to God, and specifically the God of a specific religion.
Well, there are Buddhist and Christian monasteries which I certainly know they exist. I'm sure that there are Muslim and Hindu monasteries also...
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Actually it seems to be a growing industry: monasteries are opening up their rooms to paying guests. We stayed in one in Italy recently, south of Napoli. It was like a very, very quiet hotel with a peaceful garden and a resident cat. I'd have happily stayed longer. I was also in one last year in Belgium, it was part of a larger church establishment but the location was so central it was like staying in a nice hotel.…
Monasteries have always opened their rooms to guests. Its part of the rule of Benedict to offer hospitality, including food.
By the way, monasteries existed long before the Benedict order, and other orders existed in parallel. Some monasteries did not welcome visitors, especially women and couples.
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That's religion, not church. Church is an institution. The Catholic church (and apparently particularly the Polish chapter of it) is rotten to its core. That there are good or oblivious people working for it doesn't invalidate that.
This is incorrect. Its original meaning is "assembly", "meeting" and refers to a group of people more than a building/denomination/organization: https://www.compellingtruth.org/definition-church.html .
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Keep in mind that in Germany these "church operated" services are heavily subsidised by the German state via regular taxes (not the "church tax" registered church members pay directly to their church via the tax office). In some cases this can be as much as 100% of the operating costs and salaries (although the business is operated in accordance with church labor laws rather than secular laws, allowing e.g. certain f…
This description is a bit misleading: - School: Germany mostly has public schools. If you have operated a private school for a few years, you can apply for subsidy. You will receive roughly the amount per pupil that would otherwise be needed to fund the pupil's place at a public school. So this is more or less a zero-sum game for the state. All schools have to obey public school regulations (e.g., on curriculum and e…
About 70% of church revenues come from church tax (Kirchensteuer). This is about €9.2 billion (in 2010).
As membership declines, just wondering what happens to all the cash the Churches are sitting on, from property, to art, to chuch tax collections. Going to be interesting to see what the next (younger) gen of church leaders do with it...maybe they need an innovation center to modernize the useful aspects of religion.
But will the membership decline continue in the long-run? Within the Catholic church, there is a traditionalist/conservative minority, who are growing basically through having a high birth rate – rejecting contraception and pre-marital sex, they tend to marry young and have lots of kids. Not all of those kids will follow in their parents' footsteps, but the majority of them probably will. Though these conservatives/t…
Is there any possible modern approach to a traditional catholic monastery? I think, they are dying out, because of their rigid traditions which rarely make sense in our modern world anymore. The idea of a monastery is to dedicate yourself completely to introspection and philosophy, and serving the monastery with its inhabitants, no matter what religion or philosophy. Why are they having so much trouble to keep up wit…
We could try science / engineering monasteries as described by Neal Stephenson in Anathem?
there is a reason universities have 'faculties' (e.g. 'faculties' of the 'body of knowledge') and that key persons are called 'deans'