For a Master Class on Global Worship, It’s Destination Queens

July 2, 2007

Author: DAVID GONZALEZ

Source: The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/nyregion/02citywide.html?ex=1184126400&en=9e1ffa196c7c30e5&ei=5070

Albert Walters lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where he is an Anglican priest and seminary professor. He wanted to learn more about the world’s religions.

Naturally, he went to Flushing.

This dizzyingly diverse corner of Queens is an urban showcase for the varieties of religious experience, where traditions brought over by Asian immigrants coexist alongside those of Catholics, Jews and mainline Protestants. For one week recently, it was also a laboratory for seminary professors who walked around to learn how congregations and cities affect one another. They visited a mosque whose elementary school boasted of excellent test scores, and a Sikh temple where they were treated as honored guests to a spicy home-cooked meal. They met with social workers, police officers and librarians, too, not to mention a troupe of Christian breakdancers.

Others visited Harlem and the Lower East Side. In Flushing they saw how many congregations help their members find a way to make sense of life in their adopted city. They offer a range of social services or something as basic as a free lunch and fellowship. Yet Mr. Walters was equally struck by how many of them were barely aware of what their neighbors were doing.