Academic literature on the topic 'East Jewett Methodist Church'

Abstract The Community Church of St John the Evangelist, situated on a relatively remote island off the east coast of New Zealand, is a unique ecumenical venture supported by the Anglican, Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian Churches. This paper describes and situates this venture and discusses its development and modus vivendi in light of the paradigm of receptive ecumenism. This paradigm did not feature in the thinking of those who established this ecumenical community church; nevertheless it is argued that the paradigm aptly applies, so yielding the phenomenon of an unintentional receptive ecumenism at work.

Picture, if you will, a little Methodist church in a rural setting. The year is 1890. It is the first day in January. Saturday afternoon. The church bell peals a welcome to family and friends celebrating the marriage of John Albert Salsbury and Alberta Effa Edgar. Some arrive on foot and others in horse-drawn vehicles. The horses are tied to the hitching-post and left to munch oats from their feed bags.The people enter the church, and the minister greets each by name. A good turnout. Camden East is a close-knit community, and yet the preacher notes sadly that the congregation is getting smaller every year. Soft organ music plays as the people take their places. Then all becomes quiet: a short lull before the Wedding March begins. Everyone turns around to look at the smiling bride being led down the aisle by her proud father.

Teaching Arabs, Writing Self traces Evelyn Shakir’s evolution from a buddingstudent of canon English literature who was desperately trying to “becomewhite” to her epiphany that stories from her own working-class immigrantneighborhood might be of equal worth. There, she found her unique niche bybecoming an author and scholar of Arab-American literature who helped gainrecognition for this literature as a genre, and who helped readers see ArabAmericans as people rather than stereotypes.Shakir divides her memoirs into three sections. In the first, she reflectson her childhood during an era that frowned upon diversity. Like many immigrantchildren, she turns up her nose at the “wrong” foods: “Bread withpockets. Hummus and tabouli. ‘Don’t put that stuff in my lunch box,’ I said”(p. 8). She even goes so far as to join a Methodist church whose quiet, orderlysimplicity seems more “American” than her family’s ritualistic but expressiveOrthodox church. Acculturated to the “Protestant disdain for Eastern churchesand, by extension, for the East itself,” only later does she develop “[a]n inklingthat there might be treasures I had turned my back on. That I might not alwayshave to be ashamed” (p. 13).In this section, we see the historical value of Shakir’s work not only as apersonal memoir, but also as an account of twentieth-century Americana. Bornin 1938, she offers a rare narrative voice of that era – that of a Lebanese-American and a woman; a handful of personal photos literally offer a rareglimpse into the society of Arab-American women. Many of her childhoodmemories center on Boston’s nearby Revere Beach, which boasted “slot machinesspitting out weight, fortune, photos of Rita Hayworth,” “Dodgems (‘nohead-on collisions’ but we did),” and “clams in a Fryolator … corn poppingfrantic in a display case … frozen custard (banana my favorite) spirallingthick-tongued into waffle cones, then dipped headfirst in jimmies” (p. 32).Her true claim to Americanhood is that her uncle ran the beach’s “glitzy” Cycloneroller coaster, which “gave me bragging rights among my friends andhelped situate me closer to the American norm that was always just beyondmy reach” (p. 29). The Cyclone was so important to the beach’s identity thatits closure in 1969 signaled the demise of the beach itself. “It’s those cars thattell the story,” she recollects. “As soon as masses of people could afford them,Revere lost its reason for being” (p. 43) ...

The history of the Dunham family goes back to the researches of Kingsley Dunham's grandfather, Rev. Charles Dunham (1848–1942), a Methodist Minister and diarist who, at the age of 72, brought together facts and recollections of the Dunham family. Apparently the family migrated from East Anglia and settled in the Bedford area for 200 years, centred on the village of Shillington. By the middle of the nineteenth century the family were bootmakers and shoemakers and moved to north London. Kingsley Dunham's father, Ernest Pedder Dunham, was trained in estate management at the Duke of Bedford's office in Trafalgar Square, and in 1904 he was given a position in the Pitt-Rivers estate office at Hinton St Mary, Dorset. To here he brought his bride, Edith Agnes Humphreys, to live at Newton House, Sturminster Newton. The first child, Kingsley Charles Dunham, was born on 2 January 1910. The family's time in Dorset was short, because Ernest Dunham's post came to an end in 1913 and be obtained a new appointment at Lord Boyne's estate office at Brancepeth near Durham. Although this estate was later sold to the Duke of Westminster, Ernest Dunham stayed on as agent throughout his career. Kingsley Dunham's mother Edith was a trained schoolteacher and chapel organist, and she gave him the foundations of his education and an introduction to music. Aged seven years he joined the school on the estate, Brancepeth Village School. Here he was well prepared to sit for a County Scholarship in the spring of 1921, when he was 11 years old. Dunham won the scholarship and entrance to the Durham Johnston School, a notable secondary school in the district. The teaching at the Johnston School was extremely efficient and he flourished, developing a particular interest in physical science and mathematics. His hobby was music and he was taught the organ at Durham Cathedral by the Canon Precentor, A.D. Culley. He was also a chorister at St Brandon's Church, Brancepeth, for five years, where, despite his Methodist background, the liturgy of the Anglican prayerbook made a deep and lasting impression. He was head of school in 1927 and sat for a Durham University Open Foundation Scholarship, winning a junior award. Thus, early in October 1927, aged 171/2, Dunham went up to Hatfield College, University of Durham, a scholar and later organ scholar. He was advised to read honours in chemistry with two auxiliary subjects, for which he chose physics and geology. The chemistry course was enjoyable, but the real joy was the geology course, with lectures on physical fundamentals given by Professor Arthur Holmes (FRS 1942) and practical work and fieldwork with Dr William Hopkins. The geology course and particularly the fieldwork proved to be life changing. At the end of the first year, Dunham was encouraged to continue with geology and found himself the only honours candidate in geology in his year, with almost individual attention from Professor Holmes and Dr Hopkins.

Chapter 2 narrates the history of religious healers from the time of the ancients through developments in Asia and the Greco-Roman world and in the early church. The chapter also describes the origins of hospitals as religiously sponsored institutions of care for the sick. These institutions emerged globally, across faith traditions—in the pagan world, in Christianity, in Islam, in the global East—and they remain today largely an expression of religious outreach. This can be observed in the United States, for example, in the countless religiously branded hospitals, medical centers, and healthcare facilities in most communities that go by names such as Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Adventist, Episcopal, Jewish, and so on.