title: Standpoint theory

text: Feminist standpoint theorists such as Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, Nancy Hartsock, and Sandra Harding claimed that certain socio-political positions occupied by women (and by extension other groups who lack social and economic privilege) can become sites of epistemic privilege and thus productive starting points for inquiry into questions about not only those who are socially and politically marginalized, but also those who, by dint of social and political privilege, occupy the positions of oppressors. This claim was specifically generated by Sandra Harding and as such, "Starting off research from women's lives will generate less partial and distorted accounts not only of women's lives but also of men's lives and of the whole social order." This practice is also quite evident when women enter into professions that are considered to be male oriented. Londa Schiebinger states, "While women now study at prestigious universities at about the same rate as men, they are rarely invited to join the faculty at top universities...The sociologist Harriet Zuckerman has observed that 'the more prestigious the institution, the longer women wait to be promoted.' Men, generally speaking, face no such trade-off."


title: Standpoint theory

text: Standpoint feminists have been concerned with these dualisms for two related reasons. First, dualisms usually imply a hierarchical relationship between the terms, elevating one and devaluing the other. He also said that when we suggest that decisions should be made rationally, not emotionally, for example, we are showing that reason holds a higher value in our culture than does emotion. Also, related to this issue is the concern that these dualisms often become gendered in our culture. In this process, men are associated with one extreme and women with the other. In the case of reason and emotion, women are identified with emotion. Because our culture values emotion less than reason, women suffer from this association. Feminist critics are usually concerned with the fact that dualisms force false dichotomies (partition of a whole) onto women and men, failing to see that life is less either/or than both/and, as relational dialectics theory holds.


title: Standpoint theory

text: Indigenous standpoint theory is an intricate theoretical approach in how indigenous people navigate the difficulties of their experiences within spaces which contest their epistemology. Utility of this approach stems from diverse background of marginalized groups across societies and cultures whose unique experiences have been rejected and suppressed within a majoritarian intellectual knowledge production. However, the analysis of these experiences is not the cycle of accumulation of stories, of lived experiences, and in turn, doesn’t produce limitless subjective narratives to obstruct objective knowledge. Martin Nakata is the foremost propounder of indigenous standpoint theory.


title: Standpoint theory

text: Indigenous standpoint, as well as feminist theory, expect the “knower” to address their social status of privilege to those they are researching. When addressing ourselves as ‘knowers’ into the setting, the intention isn’t to realign the focus, however, to include the social relations within what we as “knowers” know. This is a matter of respect as the researcher is expected to declare who they are and on what basis they write. This “self-awareness is fundamental to the research process because it should result in a researcher role that is respectful and not disruptive, aggressive or controlling”.


title: Standpoint theory

text: An Indigenous ‘knower’ does not possess a predisposed ‘readymade critical stance’ on the world, rather it presents questions required to answer before able to produce objective knowledge. Thus, this engagement enables us to create a critical Indigenous standpoint. This in itself doesn’t determine truth, however, produces a range potential argument with further possible answers. The arguments established, however, still, require its basis to be rational and reasonable and answer the logic and assumptions on which they were established. Thus, arguments cannot assert a claim of truth on an idea because they, the Indigenous individual, are a part of the Indigenous community as the theory wouldn’t allow to authorise themselves solely truthful on the basis of their experience. Indigenous standpoint theory is facilitated by three principles, defined by Martin Nakata.


title: Standpoint theory

text: Nakata states that these three principles allow him to forge a critical standpoint from the cultural interface and enable him to create better arguments in relation to his position within epistemologies and with other groups of ‘knowers’. However, one cannot overturn a position he is dominant in just because of his background due to the arguments being simplistic or misrepresented with no evidence to support itself etc.


title: Standpoint theory

text: Thus, Indigenous standpoint theory can be defined as a “method of inquiry, a process for making more intelligible ‘the corpus of objectified knowledge about us’ as it emerges and organizes understanding of … lived realities”.


title: Standpoint theory

text: Critics argue that standpoint theory, despite challenging essentialism, relies itself on essentialism, as it focuses on the dualism of subjectivity and objectivity. In regard to feminist standpoint theory: though it does dispel many false generalizations of women, it is argued that focus on social groups and social classes of women is still inherently essentialist. Generalizations across the entire female gender can be broken into smaller more specific groups pertaining to women's different social classes and cultures, but are still generalized as distinct groups, and thus marginalization still occurs. West and Turner state that Catherine O'Leary (1997) argued that although standpoint theory has helped reclaim women's experiences as suitable research topics, it contains a problematic emphasis on the universality of this experience, at the expense of differences among women's experiences.


title: Standpoint theory

text: Another main criticism of Harding and Wood's standpoint theory is the credibility of strong objectivity vs. subjectivity. Standpoint theorists argue that standpoints are relative and cannot be evaluated by any absolute criteria but make the assumption that the oppressed are less biased or more impartial than the privileged. This leaves open the possibility of an overbalance of power, in which the oppressed group intentionally or unintentionally becomes the oppressor. Intentional overbalance of power, or revenge, can manifest as justification for extremism and militarism, which can sometimes be seen in more extreme forms of feminism.


title: Standpoint theory

text: While standpoint theory began with a critical Marxist view of social-class oppression, it developed in the 1970s and 1980s along with changes in feminist philosophy. Other groups, as of now, need to be included into the theory and a new emphasis needs to be made toward other marginalized or muted groups. When Harding and Wood created standpoint theory, they did not account for how different cultures can exist within the same social group. "Early standpoint theorists sought to understand the way in which the gendered identity of knowers affected their epistemic resources and capacities". These other muted or marginalized groups have a more realistic approach to standpoint theory as they have different experiences than those that are in power and even within those muted groups differences defined by different cultures of people can have an altered standpoint. This view gives a basis to a central principle of standpoint theory—the inversion thesis. Academic Joshua St. Pierre defines the inversion thesis as giving "epistemic authority to those marginalized by systems of oppression insofar as these people are often better knowers than those who benefit from oppression. Put simply: social dispossession produces epistemic privilege."


title: Standpoint theory

text: Wylie has perhaps provided the most succinct articulation of second-wave standpoint theory. For her, a standpoint does not mark out a clearly defined territory such as "women" within which members have automatic privilege but is a rather a posture of epistemic engagement. Responding to the claim that the situated knowledge thesis reifies essentialism, Wylie argues that it is "an open (empirical) question whether such structures obtain in a given context, what form they take, and how they are internalized or embodied by individuals". Identities are complex and cannot be reduced to simple binaries. Likewise, she argues that the criticism of automatic privilege falters insofar as a standpoint is never given but is achieved (St. Pierre). This can be seen as an instance of moving the goalposts


title: Love Rollercoaster

text: "Love Rollercoaster" is a song by American funk/R&B band Ohio Players, originally featured on their 1975 album "Honey". It was composed by William Beck, Leroy Bonner, Marshall Jones, Ralph Middlebrooks, Marvin Pierce, Clarence Satchell, and James Williams. It was a number-one U.S. hit in January 1976, and was certified gold. In Canada, the song spent two weeks at number two. "Love Rollercoaster" was covered by American rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers for the soundtrack of the 1996 animated movie "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America."


title: Love Rollercoaster

text: The song has been the subject of a persistent urban legend since its release. A primal scream is heard in the background fairly early in the song (between 1:24 and 1:28 on the single version, or between 2:32 and 2:36 on the album version). According to the most common legend, it was the voice of an individual being murdered live while the tape was rolling. Jimmy "Diamond" Williams described the innocent nature of the scream:


title: Love Rollercoaster

text: There is a part in the song where there's a breakdown. It's guitars and it's right before the second verse and Billy Beck does one of those inhaling-type screeches like Minnie Riperton did to reach her high note or Mariah Carey does to go octaves above. The DJ made this crack and it swept the country. People were asking us, "Did you kill this girl in the studio?" The band took a vow of silence because you sell more records that way.


title: Love Rollercoaster

text: The legend appears to have evolved from an incidental comment made by an unidentified Berkeley, California disc jockey during a radio broadcast, probably in late 1975 or early 1976. It spread and mutated in several variations, probably as a result of Casey Kasem having repeated it on the nationally syndicated radio show American Top 40 in early 1976. The most common version of the legend was that the scream was from Ester Corbet, a model who appeared on the cover of the album ("Honey") purportedly stabbed by a band member, manager or engineer during the recording sessions. Subsequent variations included an elaborate backstory involving the artwork on the album cover as a motive for the stabbing. Less common variations identified the "victim" as a band member's girlfriend or cleaning woman.


title: Love Rollercoaster

text: "Love Rollercoaster" was covered by American rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers for the soundtrack of the 1996 animated movie "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America", based on the iconic MTV adult animated series "Beavis and Butt-Head", so it had a lot of diffusion on the channel in that time. It was released as a single in November 1996 through Geffen Records, being particularly successful in the UK.


title: Love Rollercoaster

text: For this version, an animated music video was made directed by Kevin Lofton. In the video, the members of the band are shown performing the song and riding together with other characters on a gigantic roller coaster, while playing some scenes from the film.


title: Love Rollercoaster

text: The song was used, amongst other uses, in an advert for the Suzuki Jimny, in the 2020 film "Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey", and in a promo for the Epcot ride "" ahead of its opening in 2022; the song, although not played outright, is also referenced to on "The Cleveland Show", serving as the title for the show's 11th episode of its pilot season. It was also used in the 2006 horror movie "Final Destination 3", and it was also used in 2004 action-adventure video game "" as song for radio station Bounce FM.


title: Courchevel

text: Courchevel () is a French Alps ski resort. It is a part of Les Trois Vallées, the largest linked ski areas in the world. Courchevel also refers to the towns of Courchevel 1300 (Le Praz), Courchevel 1550, Courchevel 1650 (Moriond), and Courchevel 1850, which are named for their altitudes in metres. On 1 January 2017, Saint-Bon-Tarentaise (1100) merged into the new commune Courchevel. The resort centre of Courchevel is at 1,747 metres (5,732 ft). The name Courchevel 1850 was chosen for marketing reasons to compete with rival ski resort Val d'Isère. It is the Jardin Alpin area of Courchevel 1850 rather than the centre which is located at 1,850 metres (6,070 ft).


title: Courchevel

text: Courchevel used to be part of the commune of Saint-Bon-Tarentaise, but in 2017 that was merged with La Perrière into the new commune of Courchevel. In spite of the name, the commune's administrative offices are not located in Courchevel, but still in the nearby village of Saint-Bon-Tarentaise. Courchevel is in the Tarentaise Valley, Savoie "département", Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. Courchevel is part of the Trois Vallées, which comprises the resorts of Courchevel, La Tania, Méribel, Les Menuires-Saint Martin, Val Thorens and Orelle.


title: Courchevel

text: The original resort was planned during World War II with a study in 1942 by the Vichy regime and in a doctorate by the town planner Laurent Chappis. Chappis was a natural choice to direct the development of the resort in the immediate post war years. Courchevel 1850 was significant, as it was the first resort in France to be constructed from scratch, rather than based around an existing village.


title: Courchevel

text: Within the Tarentaise Valley you find the biggest concentration of world-class ski resorts in the world. Most well known neighbour systems are Paradiski (Les Arcs, La Plagne) and Espace Killy (Val d'Isère and Tignes). A weekly lift ticket in Courchevel/Les Trois Vallées gives you a choice to ski one day in each of the other two systems mentioned. There were once plans to interlink all systems and resorts to create the – by far – largest ski area in the world. However, that vision was ended with the creation of the Vanoise National Park.


title: Courchevel

text: The Courchevel valley also includes the town of La Tania, built as competitors accommodation for the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville. Le Praz hosted the Olympic ski jumping and Nordic combined competitions for those games took place at Tremplin du Praz in Le Praz. There was a ski jump in Courchevel 1850 on the snowfront, which was removed recently due to safety precautions.


title: Courchevel

text: Before dawn on 20 January 2019, a fire broke out in one of the buildings in the hamlet of Courchevel 1850, which houses seasonal workers of the resort, killing two and injuring at least 22. A local French newspaper reported that 130 firefighters responded to the incident.


title: Courchevel

text: In May 2018, Courchevel was named a joint host of the 2023 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships with Méribel. It will be the first time since 2009 that France has hosted the FIS World Championships, when they took place in Val d'Isère. Races in Courchevel will finish in Courchevel Le Praz. A new super-leisure centre called L'Alpinium is under construction in Le Praz and will improve connections to Courchevel 1850 and provide more parking.


title: Courchevel

text: Courchevel is the most eastern resort of the Three Valleys, the biggest connected ski area in the world. It consists of four satellite villages: Courchevel Le Praz, Courchevel 1550, Courchevel 1650 and Courchevel 1850. Its highest resort, Courchevel 1850, is considered exclusive, attracting wealthy clientele including royal families. In the 2011–2012 season, Courchevel rebranded, changing the names of each of the four villages in a move away from the association with altitude. Courchevel 1850 is now known simply as Courchevel, Courchevel 1650 was renamed Courchevel Moriond; Courchevel 1550 is now called Courchevel Village and Courchevel 1330 was renamed Courchevel Le Praz.


title: Courchevel

text: Courchevel has 11 luxury hotels with a 5-star ranking. In 2011 France introduced a 6th star ranking for hotels, named "palaces". Eight hotels in France have received this rating, of which two are in Courchevel's Jardin Alpin area. The resort has seven restaurants with Michelin stars, of which four have two stars, including Le Chabichou. It also hosts a variety of luxury shops including Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Valentino, Loro Piana, Prada, Cartier, Fendi, Dior and Chanel. The majority of Courchevel's visitors are Gulf Arabs and Russian all of whom are considered luxury clientele. Many Russians visit during New Year and Russian Orthodox Christmas on 7 January. As a result, the first two weeks of January are high season weeks in Courchevel. The resort's name is associated with the super-rich in Russia and Middle East .


title: Courchevel

text: Courchevel has one of the largest bases for ski instructors and other seasonal workers due to the size of the three valleys area. Courchevel's couloirs are considered some of the most difficult black runs in the world.


title: Courchevel

text: Courchevel's sister city is Park City, Utah in the United States, and it has a red-graded ski piste named "Park City".


title: Courchevel

text: Courchevel's airport has a very short and steeply sloped runway, with a length of and a gradient of 18.5%. The airport has a dangerous approach through deep valleys, which can only be performed by specially certified pilots. On landing there is no go-around procedure, as most of the world's airports have; there is merely a very steep hill which has seen a few accidents since the airport first opened. Larger propeller aircraft such as the Twin Otter and Dash 7 (carrying up to 50 people) have been regular users of the airport over the years, but have since been phased out of use and smaller Cessnas and helicopters are now the main users.


title: Courchevel

text: The History Channel program "Most Extreme Airports", ranks it as the 7th most dangerous airport in the world.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: The Garden Tomb () is a rock-cut tomb in Jerusalem, which was unearthed in 1867 and is considered by some Protestants to be the site of the burial and resurrection of Jesus. The tomb has been dated by Israeli archaeologist Gabriel Barkay to the 8th–7th centuries BC. The re-use of old tombs was not an uncommon practice in ancient times, but this would seem to contradict the biblical text that speaks of a new, not reused, tomb made for himself by Joseph of Arimathea (Matthew 27:57–60, John 19:41). Also, the trough in front of the tomb and the nearby cistern, described by proponents of the Garden Tomb as part of the tomb's sealing system and as the surrounding garden's source of water, respectively, have both been archaeologically dated to the Crusader period (12th–13th centuries). The organisation maintaining the Garden Tomb refrains from claiming that this is the authentic tomb of Jesus, while pointing out the similarities with the site described in the Bible, and the fact that the Garden Tomb better preserves its ancient outlook than the more traditional, but architecturally altered and time-damaged tomb from the mostly crowded Church of the Holy Sepulchre; for all of these reasons, they suggest that the Garden Tomb is more evocative of the events described in the Gospels.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: The Garden Tomb is adjacent to a rocky escarpment which since the mid-nineteenth century has been proposed by some scholars to be Golgotha. It has since been known as Skull Hill or Gordon's Calvary after Charles Gordon. In contradistinction to this modern identification, the traditional site where the death and resurrection of Christ are believed to have occurred has been the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at least since the fourth century.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: Since 1894, the Garden Tomb and its surrounding gardens have been maintained as a place of Protestant worship and reflection by a Protestant non-denominational charitable trust based in the United Kingdom named The Garden Tomb (Jerusalem) Association, a member of the Evangelical Alliance of Israel and the World Evangelical Alliance. As such, the Garden Tomb stands as a popular site of pilgrimage for many Christians, especially Evangelicals and other Protestants.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: According to the Bible, Jesus was crucified near the city of Jerusalem, outside its walls, and there has always been concern on the issue of the tomb of Jesus being inside the city walls, with various explanations, often fictional ones, coming up during the centuries.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: For example, as early as 754 AD Saint Willibald wrote that Helena, after finding the Cross, included the site within the city walls. Some two-and-a-half centuries later, Saewulf (c. 1108 AD) maintained that it was Hadrian who enclosed the traditional Golgotha and Tomb of Christ within the city limits when he rebuilt the city during the second century AD, though they were previously outside the city. The two explanations obviously contradicted each other, since Hadrian's rebuilding of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina predated Helena's pilgrimage there by close to two centuries.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: After the Reformation there were increasing doubts regarding the traditional holy places. In 1639 Quaresmius speaks of "western heretics" who argue that the traditional site could not possibly be the true tomb of Christ. The first extant publication which argues a case against the traditional location was written by the German pilgrim Jonas Korte in 1741, a few years after his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. His book contained a chapter titled "On Mount Calvary, which now lies in the middle of the town and cannot therefore be the true Calvary".


title: The Garden Tomb

text: In 1812, also Edward D. Clarke rejected the traditional location as a "mere delusion, a monkish juggle" and suggested instead that the crucifixion took place just outside Zion Gate. During the 19th century travel from Europe to the Ottoman Empire became easier and therefore more common, especially in the late 1830s due to the reforms of the Egyptian ruler, Muhammad Ali. The subsequent influx of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem included more Protestants who doubted the authenticity of the traditional holy sites – doubts which were exacerbated by the fact that Protestants had no territorial claims at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and by the feeling of Protestant pilgrims that it was an unnatural setting for contemplation and prayer.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: In 1841, Dr. Edward Robinson's "Biblical Researches in Palestine", at that time considered the standard work on the topography and archaeology of the Holy Land, argued against the authenticity of the traditional location, concluding: "Golgotha and the Tomb shown in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are not upon the real places of the Crucifixion and Resurrection". Robinson argued that the traditional location would have been within the city walls also during the Herodian era, primarily due to topographical considerations. Robinson was careful not to propose an alternative site and had concluded that it would be impossible to identify the true location of the holy places. However, he did suggest that the crucifixion would have taken place somewhere on the road to Jaffa or the road to Damascus. Skull Hill and the Garden Tomb are located in close proximity to the Damascus road, about 200 m. from Damascus Gate.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: Contemporary scholars, such as Professor Dan Bahat, one of Israel's leading archaeologists, have concluded that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is located in an area which was outside the city walls in the days of Jesus and therefore indeed constitutes a plausible location for the crucifixion and burial of Jesus.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: Motivated by these concerns, some Protestants in the nineteenth century looked elsewhere in the attempt to locate the site of Christ's crucifixion, burial and resurrection.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: In 1842, heavily relying on Robinson's research, Otto Thenius, a German theologian and bible scholar from Dresden, was the first to publish a proposal that the rocky knoll north of Damascus Gate, which, as Thenius noticed, resembled a skull, was the biblical "Golgotha". The site he suggested contains a few natural cavities as well as a man-made cave, which Christians call Jeremiah's Grotto. Thenius went so far as to suggest that Jeremiah's Grotto was in fact the tomb of Christ. Though his proposal for the tomb of Christ did not have a lasting influence, his proposal for "Golgotha" was endorsed by several other Protestant scholars and pilgrims. Since "Golgotha" is the Aramaic word for skull, and may perhaps refer to the shape of the place, Thenius concluded that the rocky escarpment was likely to have been "Golgotha".


title: The Garden Tomb

text: A few years later the same identification was endorsed by the American industrialist Fisher Howe, who was also one of the founding members of the board of directors of Union Theological Seminary in New York. In 1850, Howe visited the Holy Land, and endorsed the view that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre could not be the true site of Christ's death and resurrection. Instead, he pointed to the hill containing Jeremiah's Grotto as the true Calvary, though he had only argued this view in length in an essay published in 1871, just after his death. In that essay Howe described the hill in these terms: "[The] hill is left steeply rounded on its west, north, and east sides forming the back and sides of the kranion, or skull. The skull-like front, or face, on the south side is formed by the deep perpendicular cutting and removal of the ledge. To the observer, at a distance, the eyeless socket of the skull would be suggested at once by the yawning cavern, hewn within its face, beneath the hill." Howe claimed that he developed his theory completely independently of Otto Thenius, and that he stumbled upon Thenius' claims only in the course of researching for his essay.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: Another early proponent of the theory that Skull Hill is Golgotha was the English scholar and clergyman Canon Henry Baker Tristram, who suggested that identification in 1858 during his first visit to the Holy Land, chiefly because of its proximity to the northern gate, and hence also to the Antonia Fortress, the traditional site of Christ's trial. (Canon Tristram was also one of the advocates of purchasing the nearby Garden Tomb in 1893.)


title: The Garden Tomb

text: Another prominent proponent of the "new Calvary" was Claude R. Conder, a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, who was appointed in 1872 by the Palestine Exploration Fund to conduct a mapping survey of Western Palestine. Conder was repulsed by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and especially by the annual "miracle of the Holy Fire", as believed in by Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolical and Coptic Christians.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: Based on topographical and textual considerations, Conder argued that it would be dangerous and unlikely, from a town-defense point of view, for the walls to have previously been east of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, concluding that the Church would have been inside the city walls and thus not the authentic tomb of Christ. He instead proposed that the true Calvary was the "rounded knoll" above Jeremiah's Grotto (i.e. Skull Hill). He based this identification on several arguments. First of all, since the Gospel according to John places Golgotha in the near vicinity of a garden and a tomb (John 19:41–42) Conder argued that Golgotha must be close to the necropolis found just north of Jerusalem, near the main road to Nablus, "among the olive-gardens and vineyards of Wady el-Joz". Secondly, Conder proposed that Calvary was the public place of execution and especially noted that Sephardic Jews had regarded the site next to Jeremiah's Grotto as traditionally being a place of stoning, which he saw as corroborative evidence that it was indeed "Golgotha". He also pointed to a Christian tradition which associated that general area with the martyrdom of St. Stephen as additional evidence that it was a public place of execution during the New Testament era. Conder actually downplayed the supposed resemblance to a skull which he viewed as immaterial, remarking: "I should not like to base an argument on so slight a resemblance". In his writings Conder refers to Skull Hill by the Arabic name El-Heidhemiyeh which he interpreted as "the rent", and which he proposed was a corruption of El-Heiremiyeh – "the place of Jeremiah". However, later research has shown that the name is actually a corruption of El-Adhamiyeh, named after a zawiya which according to Muslim tradition was founded by the celebrated Sufi saint Ibrahim ibn Adham. Charles Wilson spelled the name as El Edhemîyeh.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: Additionally, in the 1870s the site of Skull Hill was being strongly promoted by several notable figures in Jerusalem, including the American consul to Jerusalem, Selah Merril, who was also a Congregationalist minister and a member of the American Palestine Exploration Society, the Protestant Bishop of Jerusalem Samuel Gobat, who presided over the joint bishopric for Anglicans, Lutherans and Calvinists in the Holy Land, as well as Conrad Schick, a prominent Jerusalem-based architect, city planner, and proto-archaeologist of Swiss origins who penned hundreds of articles for the Palestine Exploration Fund.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: In 1879 the French scholar Ernest Renan, author of the influential and controversial "Life of Jesus" also considered this view as a possibility in one of the later editions of his book.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: However, the most famous proponent of the view that Skull Hill is the biblical "Golgotha" was Major-General Charles Gordon who visited Jerusalem in 1883. His name has become so entwined with Skull Hill that many contemporary news articles and guide books erroneously state that Gordon was the first to discover the site. In reality Gordon was very much influenced by the arguments of Conder and by his conversations and correspondence with Schick.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: Gordon went beyond Howe and Conder to passionately propose additional arguments, which he himself confessed were "more fanciful" and imaginative. Gordon proposed a typological reading of Leviticus 1:11: "[The sheep for a burnt-offering] shall be slaughtered on the north side of the altar before the LORD". Gordon interpreted this verse to mean that Christ, the prototype, must also have been slain north of the "altar" (Skull Hill being north of Jerusalem and of the Temple Mount). This typological interpretation is obviously theological and not scientific in nature, which leads to a very skeptical mention by a prominent detractors of "Gordon's Calvary", the researcher and Army officer Charles W. Wilson. Gordon also commented on the appropriateness of the location in a letter he sent to his sister on January 17, 1883, his second day in Jerusalem:


title: The Garden Tomb

text: The Church of the Holy Sepulchre has the tomb just a few yards away from Golgotha, corresponding with the account of John the Evangelist: "Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid." KJV (). In the latter half of the 19th century a number of tombs had also been found near Gordon's Golgotha, and Gordon concluded that one of them must have been the tomb of Jesus. John also specifies that Jesus' tomb was located in a garden (); consequently, an ancient wine press and cistern have been cited as evidence that the area had once been a garden, and the somewhat isolated tomb adjacent to the cistern has become identified as the "Garden Tomb" of Jesus. This particular tomb also has a stone groove running along the ground outside it, which Gordon argued to be a slot that once housed a stone, corresponding to the biblical account of a stone being rolled over the tomb entrance to close it.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: The garden is administered by the Garden Tomb Association, a member of the Evangelical Alliance of Israel and the World Evangelical Alliance.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: In the 20th century, archaeological findings enhanced the discussion concerning the authenticity of the traditional site at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre:


title: The Garden Tomb

text: Besides the skull-like appearance (a modern-day argument), there are a few other details put forward in favour of the identification of Skull Hill as "Golgotha". The location of the site would have made executions carried out there a highly visible sight to people using the main road leading north from the city; the presence of the skull-featured knoll in the background would have added to the deterrent effect.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: Eusebius (260s – c. 340) comments that "Golgotha" was in his day pointed out "north of Mount Zion". Both the Garden Tomb's "Golgotha" and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are north of the hill currently referred to as Mount Zion. Although in the Hebrew Bible the term Mount Zion referred to the Temple Mount or the spur south of it, which both lay east of Jerusalem's Central Valley, the name Mount Zion has been used for Jerusalem's western hill, both by Josephus in the first century AD, and in the Byzantine period by Christian sources.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: An extra-biblical Christian legend maintains that "Golgotha" (lit. "the skull") is Adam's burial site, while Talmudic-period Judaism held that Adam is buried in the cave of Machpelah in Hebron, and the name "Golgotha" is absent from Talmudic literature. The 1906 "Jewish Encyclopedia" states that the Talmudic-period rabbis created the concept that "Adam was created from the dust of the place where the sanctuary was to rise for the atonement of all human sin", i.e. the Jerusalem Temple's Holy of Holies, so that sin should not constitute a constant or characteristic attribute of human nature; Christians adapted this thought and relocated Adam's grave to what they considered to be the new place of atonement, Jesus' crucifixion site at Golgotha.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: The earliest detailed investigation of the tomb itself was a brief report prepared in 1874 by Conrad Schick, a German architect, archaeologist and Protestant missionary, but the fullest archaeological study of the area has been the seminal investigation by Gabriel Barkay, professor of Biblical archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Bar-Ilan University, during the late twentieth century.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: The tomb has two chambers, the second to the right of the first, with stone benches along the back wall of the first chamber, and along the sides of each wall in the second chamber, except the wall joining it to the first chamber; the benches have been heavily damaged but are still discernible. The edge of the groove outside the tomb has a diagonal edge, which would be unable to hold a stone slab in place (the slab would just fall out); additionally, known tombs of the rolling-stone type use vertical walls on either side of the entrance to hold the stone, not a groove on the ground.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: In 1986, Barkay criticized defenders of the location of the garden and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for making more theological and apologetic than scientific arguments.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: In 2010, the director of the garden, Richard Meryon, claimed in an interview with "The Jerusalem Post" that each camp had academic and archaeological evidence in favor of the actual location, and that only one of the two could be right, but that the important thing was the symbolism of the place and especially the history of Jesus and not a guarantee of the exact site. In the same interview, Steve Bridge, a retired pastor volunteering in the garden, claimed that Catholic groups came to the site regularly, and that the guides did not play politics, with the emphasis on the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: Due to the archaeological issues the Garden Tomb site raises, several scholars have rejected its claim to be Jesus' tomb. Author and explorer Paul Backholer concludes the emphasis on feelings in evangelical circles, has encouraged many to ‘feel’ the Garden Tomb is the location, despite evidence to the contrary. However, despite the archaeological discoveries, the Garden Tomb has become a popular place of pilgrimage among Protestants including, in the past, Anglicans. As such, St. George's Anglican Cathedral was built away from the Garden Tomb.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: The Garden Tomb has been the most favoured candidate site among leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.


title: The Garden Tomb

text: Major Christian denominations, including the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, do not accept the Garden Tomb as being the tomb of Jesus and hold fast to the traditional location at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. However, many may also visit the site in order to see an ancient tomb in a location evocative of the situation described in .


title: The Garden Tomb

text: The British author, barrister and civil servant, Arthur William Crawley Boevey (1845–1913) produced for the Committee of the Garden Tomb Maintenance Fund in Jerusalem an introduction and guidebook to the site in 1894. The booklet has subsequently been revised and enlarged on several occasions, including by Mabel Bent in the early 1920s.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: Airavatesvara Temple is a Hindu temple of Dravidian architecture located in Kumbakonam, Thanjavur District in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. This temple, built by Chola emperor Rajaraja II in the 12th century CE is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, along with the Brihadeeswara Temple at Thanjavur, the Gangaikondacholisvaram Temple at Gangaikonda Cholapuram that are referred to as the Great Living Chola Temples.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: The Airavatesvarar temple is one among a cluster of eighteen medieval era large Hindu temples in the Kumbakonam area, Thanjavur District. The temple is dedicated to Shiva. It also reverentially displays Vaishnavism and Shaktism traditions of Hinduism, along with the legends associated with Nayanmars – the Bhakti movement saints of Shaivism.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: The stone temple incorporates a chariot structure, and includes major Vedic and Puranic deities such as Indra, Agni, Varuna, Vayu, Brahma, Surya, Vishnu, Saptamtrikas, Durga, Saraswati, Sri devi (Lakshmi), Ganga, Yamuna, Subrahmanya, Ganesha, Kama, Rati and others. Shiva's consort has a dedicated shrine called the Periya Nayaki Amman temple. This is a detached temple situated to the north of the Airavateshvarar temple. This might have been a part of the main temple when the outer courts were complete. At present, parts of the temple such as the gopuram is in ruins, and the main temple and associated shrines stand alone. It has two sun dials namely morning and evening sun dials which can be seen as wheels of the chariot. The temple continues to attract large gatherings of Hindu pilgrims every year during Magha, while some of the images such as those of Durga and Shiva are part of special "pujas".


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: The Airavatesvara Temple is located in Kumbakonam city, southwest of Chennai and from Chidambaram. It is about to the northeast to the Brihadeeswara Temple in Thanjavur, and about to the southwest of Gangaikonda Cholapuram Temple. All three are a part of the UNESCO world heritage site.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: The nearest airport with regular services is Tiruchirappalli International Airport (IATA: TRZ), about away. The temple is on highway 22 connecting Tiruchirappalli, and highway 36 connecting it to Thanjavur. The nearby cities of Tiruchirapalli and Chidambaram are connected daily to other major cities by the network of Indian Railways and Tamil Nadu bus services.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: The temple though inland, is near the Kollidam River, within the Kaveri (Cauvery) delta with access to the Bay of Bengal and through it to the Indian Ocean.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: The Airavatesvara Shiva temple has a water tank. This tank has a connected channel that brings in Cauveri River water where Hindus gather annually to take a dip. The local mythology narrates how Airavata, or Indra's (malla) white elephant was restored with clean, white skin after he took a dip in this tank. This legend is carved in stone in the inner shrine, and this Indra's elephant gives this temple its name.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: The Cholas built hundreds of Hindu temples across their empire. Of these four were vast complexes with all stone "vimanas". The Airavatesvara temple is one of these four. The other three are the temples found in Thanjavur built by Rajaraja I, in Gangaikonda Cholapuram built by Rajendra I, and in Tribuvanam by the later era Chola king Kulottunga II.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: The Airavatesvara temple is another square plan structure completed in 1166 CE. The surviving inner courtyard is almost six stacked squares of side, measuring a total of about by . The Nandi mandapa and the stambha are found outside of this main temple courtyard and they are aligned with the main temple's east–west axis.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: It is classified as Karakkoil, a temple fashioned after temple chariots which are taken in procession around the temple during festivals. The temple sanctum is a square, have thick walls on which the "vimana" superstructure rises to a height of . The circumambulatory path is not provided immediately around the sanctum, as is found in the Thanjuvur big temple and the Gangaikonda Cholapuram temple. Rather, this path is outside in the courtyard. The sanctum "garbha griya" is connected to the "mukha-mandapa" through the "ardha-mandapa" supported on pillars and flanked by two massive dvarapalas. The "maha-mandapa" is a rectangle of about by , with six rows of right pillars (forty-eight in total). These have reliefs and intricate carvings. Towards the east of the "maha-mandapa" is the "agra-mandapa" also called the "Rajagambhiran-tiru-mandapam" after the king. This hall is shaped like a chariot, provided with stone horses and wheels. The design is similar to the "Nritta-sabha" (community dance hall) of the Chidambaram temple and the Konark Sun Temple near Puri, Odisha.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: The "agra mandapa" has an attached square porch of side. It has ornately carved steps that go from east to west. On its east, outside the main podium, is the "bali-pitham". It is unusual, in that it is produced as intricately carved balustraded steps. When one walks or steps on them, they produce a musical note. They are therefore called the "singing steps".


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: This temple is a storehouse of art and "architecture" and has some exquisite stone carvings. Although this temple is much smaller than the Brihadeesvara Temple or the Gangaikondacholapuram Temple, it is more exquisite in detail. The elevation and proportions of all the units is elegant with sculptures dominating the architecture. The pedestal of the "Balipitha" adjoins a small shrine which contains an image of Ganesha.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: The reliefs all along the base of the main temple narrate the stories of the sixty three Shaiva Bhakti saints called Nayanars. These stories are found in the "Periya Purana" by Sekkilar.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: On the outer walls of the main sanctum are sculpture niches, five on each side, with the middle one larger than others. They show various Hindu deities, with the middle one of each side showing Shiva in different aspects.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: In the south-west corner of the court is a "mandapam" having 4 shrines. One of these has an image of Yama. Adjoining this shrine are large stone slabs sculptured with images of the "sapthamathas" (seven celestial nymphs). The construction of a separate temple for Devi, slightly later than the main temple, indicates the emergence of the Amman shrine as an essential component of the South Indian temple complex.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: There are various inscriptions in the temple. One of these records the renovation of the shrines by Kulottunga Chola III. The north wall of the "verandah" consists of 108 sections of inscriptions, each containing the name and description and image of the 63 "Saivacharya" (Saivite saints) listing the principal events in their life. This reflects the deep roots of Saivism in this region. Other important sculptures of the temple are the 108 Devara Othuvars who sung in the temple during the time of Raja Raja II. There are sculptures for river goddesses like Cauvery, Ganges, Yamuna, Godavari and Narmada. Another inscription close to the "gopura", records that an image was brought from Kalyani, then known as Kalyanapura by emperor Rajadhiraja Chola I after his defeat of the Western Chalukya king Someshwara I, his sons Vikramaditya VI and Someshwara II his capture of the Chalukyan capital.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: The inscriptions are also important in identifying the sculptures that once were a part of various ruined monuments. For example, the eastern gopurum has niches with inscriptions that label the sculpture therein. Most of these sculptures are now broken or missing. The inscriptions indicate that it had the following sculptures:


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: The temple was built by King Rajaraja Chola II. He ruled the Chola Empire between 1146 and 1172 CE. The established capital for his predecessors was Gangapuri, also referred to in some inscriptions as Gangaikonda Cholapuram, named after the holy Ganges River and goddess. Rajaraja II, however, spent most of his time in the secondary capital city of Ayirattali, also called Pazhaiyarai and Rajarajapuri. This urban complex included Darasuram, the site of Airavatesvara Temple in Kumbakonam. He was a patron of Tamil literature and sponsored new Hindu temples in the empire, instead of enhancements and expansions supported by his father and grandfather. The temple at Ayirattali, which came to be known as the Airavatesvarar temple in inscriptions is one of his legacies.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: The Airavatesvara temple was much larger than it is now. It had "sapta veedhis" (seven streets) and seven courts, similar to the Srirangam temple, according to the inscriptions. All are gone, except the one court with the main temple that survives. There are ruins of gopuram and some structures at some distance from the current visitor premises confirming that the site was badly damaged at some point like the other major Chola era temples and various Chola cities including the capital Gangaikonda Cholapuram.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: The reasons for this destruction are unclear. According to Vasanthi, the Pandyas who defeated the Cholas during the later part of 13th century "may have raged the city [Gangaikonda Cholapuram] to ground" to avenge their previous defeats.chapter=Excavation at Gangaikonda Cholapuram, the imperial capital of Rajendra Chola, and its significance However, it is unclear why other temples were destroyed and this temple was spared, as well as why there are around 20 inscriptions from later Cholas, Pandyas and Vijayanagar Empire indicating various gifts and grants to this temple. An alternate theory links the destruction to the raids, plunder and wars, particularly with the invasion of the capital city and the territories that were earlier a part by the Chola Empire along with Madurai by the armies of Delhi Sultanate led by the Muslim commander Malik Kafur in 1311, followed by Khusrau Khan in 1314 and Muhammad bin Tughlaq in 1327. The period that followed saw wars between the Hindu kings and the Muslim Sultans who seceded the Delhi Sultanate and carved out new polity such as the nearby Madurai Sultanate (1335–1378).Thanjavur was a target of both Muslim and Hindu neighboring kingdoms, both near and far. The Madurai Sultanate was established in the 14th century, after the disastrous invasions and plunder of South India by Ala ud-Din Khalji's armies of Delhi Sultanate led by Malik Kafur.George Michell (2008), Architecture and art of Southern India, Cambridge University Press, pages 9–13, 16-21 Later Adil Shahi Sultanate, Qutb Shahis, Randaula Khan and others from east and west coasts of South India raided it, and some occupied it for a few years. The Vijayanagara Empire defeated the Madurai Sultanate in 1378 and this temple along with other Chola era temples thereafter came under Hindu kings again who repaired and restored many of them.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: Airavatesvara Temple was added to UNESCO's World Heritage Site list of Great Living Chola Temples in the year 2004. The Great Living Chola Temples includes the Brihadeeswara Temple at Thanjavur, the Temple of Gangaikondacholisvaram at Gangaikonda Cholapuram and the Airavatesvara Temple at Kumbakonam. All of these temples were built by the Cholas between the 10th and 12th centuries CE and have a lot of similarities.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: The American astronomer Carl Sagan visited the Airavatesvara Temple for his 1980 television documentary series, . In the tenth episode titled "The Edge of Forever", Sagan talks about the Hindu religion and the Vedas, and narrates the legend of the god Shiva being considered a cosmic deity while displaying ancient Indian art.


title: Airavatesvara Temple

text: Thanjavur Palace Devasthanam comprises 88 temples, of which this temple is the one. They are maintained and administered by the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department of the Government of Tamil Nadu.


title: Willi Herold

text: Willi Herold (11 September 192514 November 1946), also known as "the Executioner of Emsland," was a German war criminal. Near the end of World War II in Europe, Herold deserted from the German Army and, posing as a "Luftwaffe" captain, organized the mass execution of German army deserters held at a prison camp. Herold was arrested by British forces and executed for war crimes on 14 November 1946 at Wolfenbüttel prison.


title: Willi Herold

text: He joined the Jungvolk when he was 10 years old in 1935, but was expelled the next year for skipping service and trying to organize his own "pack" of boys, both of which were against the regulations. He then joined the Hitler Youth at the age of fourteen, and for a time he was enthralled by them, thanks to the long nature excursions they took him on and the various benefits they provided.


title: Willi Herold

text: After completing his elementary education, he began an apprenticeship as a chimney sweep at the age of fifteen in the neighboring village of Waldheim, from which he eventually ran away with a friend because he didn't feel like working and wanted to emigrate to America. He was apprehended by the Gestapo and sent back to Lunzenau. He completed his apprenticeship in 1943.


title: Willi Herold

text: He served his Reich Labour Service on the Atlantic Wall in France from June to September 1943, and three weeks after turning eighteen, he joined the army and was deployed to Tangermünde.


title: Willi Herold

text: On 30 September 1943, Herold entered military service. He was trained as a paratrooper ("Fallschirmjäger") in Tangermünde because of his above-average physical fitness. His division was the last to undergo near-full paratrooper training, with three months of infantry training and a sixteen-day parachute course. He was promoted to Lance Corporal after participating in the battles of Nettuno and Monte Cassino in early 1944. He claimed he was awarded the Iron Cross 1st and 2nd Class (for supposedly destroying two British tanks on the beaches of Salerno), the Silver Close Combat Clasp, the Silver Wound Badge, the Parachutist Badge and the Infantry Badge. Records of him ever receiving these medals have not been found so far.


title: Willi Herold

text: In March 1945, Herold's unit retreated from the Netherlands to Germany. In the chaos of the retreating German army, Herold became separated from his unit in late March 1945, and he was left to travel by himself on the lengthy route between Gronau and Bad Bentheim. In a shot-up Wehrmacht car that was lying in a ditch on the side of the road, he found the uniform of a highly decorated Luftwaffe Captain and assumed the fictional identity of "Captain Herold of the Sixth Parachute Division." After convincing a Major he met at a control point in Ochtrup, he received four soldiers under his command. Although he had a core group of twelve people, roughly sixty more would occasionally join him and depart when it was convenient for them. Herold was remarkably only required to provide identification twice despite claiming to be on a special mission from the Führer.


title: Willi Herold

text: Along with numerous scouting missions, Herold also made numerous attempts to engage the enemy, culminating in him and his men joining the unit stationed close to the village of Lathen, which was occupied by the Allies. However, this effort failed, and he ordered a retreat when he lost too many men to enemy tank fire. Herold started to consider ways to recruit more soldiers as he grew frustrated that he lacked the men and equipment necessary to truly impact the enemy. He encountered local garrison commander Jann Budde in the Surwold village, who informed him that hundreds of former Wehrmacht soldiers were waiting for the war to conclude in the Penal Camp II Aschendorfermoor. Herold discovered a chance to address his personnel issue and made his way to the camp.


title: Willi Herold

text: On 11 April 1945, Herold's group arrived at the Aschendorfermoor II prison camp (containing mostly German inmates), one of the Emslandlager camps. There, he was asked by one of the camp supervisors, Karl Schütte, to judge a group of 30 inmates which had escaped during a forced march to Collinghorst and had been recaptured. Herold ordered five of the men to be shot, and was eventually stopped by the judicial official Friedrich Hansen, who asked Herold to obtain permission from Dr. Richard Thiel, the head of the central administration of the prison camps. Having failed to obtain permission from Dr. Thiel after a lengthy visit, Herold visited Nazi district leader Gerhard Buscher, who got the Gestapo involved. Through Buscher, the Gestapo granted Herold permission to execute the 30 escaped inmates. Over the next two weeks, Herold would order the execution of not only the 30 escaped inmates, but a large number of political prisoners from a list of 400 names compiled by Dr. Thiel.


title: Willi Herold

text: Herold also chose a large number of inmates, equipped them with uniforms and weapons and dispatched them to the town of Leer to join the Wehrmacht, but this plan was ultimately unsuccessful since the troops quickly surrendered to advancing Polish forces. On 19 April 1945, British bomber planes attacked a nearby antiaircraft battery, and a few bombs hit the camp, destroying it completely.


title: Willi Herold

text: Herold recruited 12 prisoners and converted them into his bodyguards. They traveled north, terrifying the populace as they went from town to town. They executed five Dutchmen accused of espionage after removing them from a nearby prison, making them dig their own graves, and hanging a farmer who had flown a white flag. He and his men were taken into custody in an Aurich hotel on 30 April. He was put on trial by the authorities on 3 May 1945, but the trial was interrupted and he was conditionally released, thanks to the combined efforts of the Kriegsmarine Chief Justice for the East Frisian region Horst Franke and Admiral Kurt Weyher. Herold was brought to a special unit, where he was warmly welcomed, but he swiftly left under the cover of darkness and traveled to the port city of Wilhelmshaven. Under his true name, he assembled a soldier's paybook and discharge documents before resuming work as a chimney-sweep.


title: Willi Herold

text: Herold was arrested by Royal Navy personnel on 23 May 1945 for the theft of a loaf of bread, and was sent to CIC Esterwegen. During the summer of 1945, the British investigated Herold's crimes, laboring under the initial impression that his victims had been citizens of Allied countries. On 1 February 1946, Herold and 50 other inmates from CIC Esterwegen were forced by the British occupying forces to dig up the remains of the inmates murdered at Aschendorfermoor camp.


title: Willi Herold

text: A total of 195 bodies were excavated. In August 1946, Herold and 12 others were tried in Oldenburg by the British, overseen by Colonel Herbert Bown. Herold was notable for his apparently relaxed demeanor and lack of remorse. On 29 August 1946, Herold and six other co-defendants: Karl Hagewald, Bernhard Meyer, Karl Schütte, Josef Euler, Hermann Brandt and Otto Paeller, were sentenced to death; Herold in particular was held responsible for the murder of 111 people. On 14 November 1946, Herold and the five other defendants were executed by guillotining by Friedrich Hehr in Wolfenbüttel prison. Herold showed courage and coolness, in contrast to some of his other collaborators, according to the chief interrogator Major Pantcheff, who was present at the execution.


title: Bhilai

text: Bhilai is a city in Durg district of the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, in eastern central India. With population exceeding 1 million, it is the second-largest urban area in Chhattisgarh after Raipur. Bhilai is a major industrial city as well as an education hub of central India. The Bhilai metropolis contains three municipal corporations: Bhilai Municipal Corporation, Bhilai-Charoda Municipal Corporation and Risali Municipal Corporation.


title: Bhilai

text: The city is home to several industries like Bhilai Steel Plant, Jaypee Cement, Orient Cement, NSPCL Bhilai Power Plant, Steel Authority of India, FSNL and ACC Cement. The city is home to Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai. Jama Masjid in Bhilai is one of the largest mosques in India. The state's oldest zoo is Maitri Bagh in Bhilai.


title: Bhilai

text: It is believed that the name "Bhilai" is derived from the Bhil tribe which originally inhabited this region and continues to dwell in the nearby forests until today. The Bhilai word meaning is Bhils came (Bhil= Tribe, Ai= Came).


title: Bhilai

text: Bhilai was a small village and a part of the Haihaiyavansi Kingdom until 1740 when it was conquered by the Marathas.


title: Bhilai

text: The foundation of the modern city of Bhilai was laid in 1955 when the Indian government signed a historic agreement with the Soviet Union in Magnitogorsk to establish a steel plant near the village. The first blast furnace of the plant was commissioned in 1959 by the first president of India, Dr. Rajendra Prasad.


title: Bhilai

text: In the 2011 census, Bhilai Nagar Urban Agglomeration had a population of 1,064,222, of which 545,916 are males and 518,306 are females. Bhilai has an average literacy rate of 86.63%, male literacy is 92.22% and, female literacy is 80.71%.


title: Bhilai

text: Bhilai lies at 21.21°N 81.38°E in Central India at an elevation of 297m above sea level on the banks of the Shivnath river, a tributary of the river Mahanadi. It covers an area of 341 km (132 sq mi).


title: Bhilai

text: According to the Bureau of Indian Standards, the town falls under seismic zone 2, in a scale of 2 to 5 (in order of increasing value of vulnerability to earthquakes).


title: Bhilai

text: Owing to its proximity to the Tropic of Cancer, Bhilai has a tropical climate. There are three main seasons: summer, monsoon, and winter. The average annual temperature in Bhilai is 26.6 °C and the city receives an average rainfall of 1188 mm in a year. Summers usually last from May to June, followed by monsoons in July and August. The town receives the bulk of rainfall in July, with an average rainfall of 352mm. There is little rainfall during the winters, with November being the driest month of the year.


title: Bhilai

text: Bhilai is home to the Bhilai Steel Plant, the first and largest Indian plant to produce steel rails. The inauguration of the first blast furnace of Bhilai Steel Plant was done by then president of India Dr. Rajendra Prasad, which was established with help from the Soviet Union in 1955.


title: Bhilai

text: Iron ore from Rajhara, limestone from Nandini, coal from Jharia, manganese from Balaghat, electric power from the Kosa thermal power plant, and water from the Tandula Canal, all nearby, are used in the Bhilai Steel Plant to manufacture rails and structural steel. Pig iron and billets are supplied to foundries and rolling mills located at Kumhari and other sites in central India.


title: Bhilai

text: The number of steel rails produced by the facility till 2007 can go around the circumference of the earth 7.5 times. This is depicted on the monument at the globe square in the heart of the city. The facility underwent modernization and expansion and is amongst the leading manufacturers of iron and steel in Asia.


title: Bhilai

text: The city serves as an educational hub in the region, with a total of 59 universities and colleges, like Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bhilai, Chhattisgarh Swami Vivekanand Technical University, Bhilai Institute of Technology, Rungta Group Of Institutions, St. Thomas College, Shri Shankaracharya Group of Institutions, Christian College of Engineering & Technology, Kalyan College, Sector 7, Bhilai and CSIT Engineering College.


title: Bhilai

text: Schools in Bhilai are run either by municipal corporations or privately by entities, trusts, and corporations. The majority of schools are affiliated with the Chhattisgarh Board of Secondary Education and the Central Board of Secondary Education.


title: Bhilai

text: There are 3 railway stations in Bhilai city, Bhilai railway station, Bhilai Nagar railway station & Bhilai Power House railway station.


title: Bhilai

text: The Durg Bus Stand is a hub where you can find any bus to any place in and around Chhattisgarh as well as other parts of the country.


title: Bhilai

text: The nearest major airport is Swami Vivekananda International Airport, Raipur, which is 50km far away from here.


title: Die Welt

text: Die Welt ("The World") is a German national daily newspaper, published as a broadsheet by Axel Springer SE.


title: Die Welt

text: "Die Welt" is the flagship newspaper of the Axel Springer publishing group. Its leading competitors are the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" and the "Frankfurter Rundschau".


title: Die Welt

text: The modern paper takes a self-described "liberal cosmopolitan" position in editing, but it is generally considered to be conservative.


title: Die Welt

text: As of 2016, the average circulation of "Die Welt" is about 180,000. The paper can be obtained in more than 130 countries. Daily regional editions appear in Berlin and Hamburg. A daily regional supplement also appears in Bremen. The main editorial office is in Berlin, in conjunction with the "Berliner Morgenpost".


title: Die Welt

text: "Die Welt" was a founding member of the European Dailies Alliance, and has a longstanding co-operation with comparable daily newspapers from other countries, including "The Daily Telegraph" (UK), "Le Figaro" (France), and "ABC" (Spain).


title: Die Welt

text: From 2004 to 2019, the newspaper also published a compact edition entitled "Welt Kompakt", a 32-page cut-down version of the main broadsheet targeted to a younger public. The paper does not appear on Sundays, but the linked publication "Welt am Sonntag" takes its place.


title: Die Welt

text: "Die Welt" was founded in Hamburg in 1946 by the British occupying forces, aiming to provide a "quality newspaper" modelled on "The Times". It originally carried news and British-viewpoint editorial content, but from 1947 it adopted a policy of providing two leading articles on major questions, one British and one German. The newspaper was bought by Axel Springer in 1953.


title: Die Welt

text: The 1993 circulation of the paper was 209,677 copies. At its peak in the occupation period, it had a circulation of around a million.


title: Die Welt

text: In November 2010, a redesign for the newspaper was launched, featuring a new logo with a dark blue globe, a reduced number of columns from seven to six, and typography based on the Freight typeface designed by Joshua Darden. "Welt Kompakt" was also redesigned to use that typeface. In 2009, the Sunday edition "Welt am Sonntag" was recognized as one of the "World's Best-Designed Newspapers" by the Society for News Design, along with four other newspapers.


title: Die Welt

text: On 2 May 2014, the Swiss German business magazine "BILANZ" began to be published as a monthly supplement of "Die Welt".


title: Die Welt

text: The paper was banned in Egypt in February 2008 due to the publication of cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad.


title: Die Welt

text: Since 1999, the "Die Welt" book supplement "Die Literarische Welt" ("The Literary World") has presented an annual literature prize available to international authors. The award is in honor of Willy Haas who founded "Die Literarische Welt" in 1925.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: The history of Christianity in Britain covers the religious organisations, policies, theology and popular religiosity since ancient times.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: The Roman Catholic Church was the dominant form of Christianity in Britain from the 6th century through to the Reformation period in the Middle Ages. The (Anglican) Church of England became the independent established church in England and Wales in 1534 as a result of the English Reformation. In Wales, disestablishment took place in 1920 when the Church in Wales became independent from the Church of England. In Scotland, the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland, established in a separate Scottish Reformation in the 16th century, is recognized as the national church, but not established.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: Following the Reformation, adherence to the Catholic Church continued at various levels in different parts of Britain, especially among recusants and in the north of England. Particularly from the mid-17th century, forms of Protestant nonconformity, including Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and, later, Methodists, grew outside of the established church.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: People in Roman Britain typically believed in a wide range of gods and goddesses, and worshipped several of them, likely selecting some local and tribal deities as well as some of the major divinities venerated across the Empire. Both indigenous British deities and introduced Roman counterparts were venerated in the region, sometimes syncretising together, as in cases like Apollo-Cunomaglus and Sulis-Minerva. Romano-British temples were sometimes erected at locations that had earlier been cultic sites in pre-Roman Iron Age Britain. A new style of "Romano-Celtic temple" developed which was influenced by both Iron Age and imperial Roman architectural styles but also unique from both; buildings in this style remained in use until the 4th century. The cults of various eastern deities had also been introduced to Roman Britain, among them those of the deities Isis, Mithras, and Cybele; Christianity was just one of these eastern cults. The archaeologist Martin Henig suggested that to "sense something of the spiritual environment of Christianity at this time", it would be useful to imagine India, where Hinduism, "a major polytheistic system", remains dominant, and "where churches containing images of Christ and the Virgin are in a tiny minority against the many temples of gods and goddesses".


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: The late Romano-British population seem to have been mostly Christian by the Sub-Roman period. The Great Conspiracy in the 360s and increased raiding around the time of the Roman withdrawal from Britain saw some enslaved. Later medieval legends concerning the conversion of the island under King Lucius or from a mission by St Philip or Joseph of Arimathea have been discredited; they are alleged to be "pious forgeries" introduced in attempts to establish independence or seniority in the ecclesiastical hierarchy formalised following the Norman conquest of England and Wales. The first archaeological evidence and credible records showing a community large enough to maintain churches and bishops date to the 3rd and 4th centuries. These more formal organisational structures arose from materially modest beginnings: the British delegation to the 353 Council of Rimini had to beg for financial assistance from its fellows in order to return home. The Saxon invasions of Britain destroyed most of the formal church structures in the east of Britain as they progressed, replacing it with a form of Germanic polytheism. There seems to have been a lull in the Saxon westward expansion traditionally attributed to the Battle of Badon but, following the arrival of Justinian's Plague around 547, the expansion resumed. By the time Cornwall was subjugated by Wessex at Hingston Down in 838, however, it was largely left to its native people and practices which remained inherently Christian in character and St Piran's Oratory is dated to the 6th century, making it one of the oldest extant Christian sites in Britain.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: In comparison to its uninterrupted continuity in the culturally Brittonic west, Christianity was extinguished in the east with the arrival of the Saxons, and was reintroduced to eastern Britain by the Gregorian Mission, . Establishing his archdiocese at Canterbury, St Augustine failed to establish his authority over the Welsh church at Chester but his mission—with help from Scottish missionaries such as SS Aidan and Cuthbert—proved successful in Kent and then Northumbria: the two provinces of the English Church continue to be led from the cathedrals of Canterbury and York ( 735). Owing to the importance of the Scottish missions, Northumbria initially followed the native Church in its calculation of Easter and tonsure but then aligned itself with Canterbury and Rome at the 664 Synod of Whitby. Early English Christian documents surviving from this time include the 7th-century illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels and the historical accounts written by the Venerable Bede.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: Christianity in post-conquest England was generally separatist in character, with the right to appoint bishops belonging to the king despite papal objections.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: By the 11th century, the Normans had overrun England and begun the invasion of Wales. St Osmund, bishop of Salisbury, codified the Sarum Rite and, by the time of his successor, Roger, a system of endowed prebends had been developed that left ecclesiastical positions independent of the bishop. During the reign of Henry II, the rising popularity of the Grail myth stories coincided with the increasingly central role of communion in Church rituals. Tolerance of commendatory benefices permitted the well-connected to hold multiple offices simply for their spiritual and temporal revenues, subcontracting the position's duties to lower clerics or simply treating them as sinecures. The importance of such revenues prompted the Investiture Crisis, which erupted in Britain over the fight occasioned by King John's refusal to accept Pope Innocent III's nominee as archbishop of Canterbury. England was placed under interdict in 1208 and John excommunicated the following year; he enjoyed the seizure of the Church's revenues but finally relented owing to domestic and foreign rivals strengthened by papal opposition. Although John quickly reneged on his payments, Innocent thereafter took his side and roundly condemned the Magna Carta, calling it "not only shameful and demeaning but illegal and unjust". A major reform movement or heresy of the 14th century was Lollardy, led by John Wycliffe, who translated the Bible into English. Posthumously condemned, his body was exhumed and burnt and its ashes thrown into the River Swift.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: Even before the Conquest, Edward the Confessor had returned from Normandy with masons who constructed Westminster Abbey (1042) in the Romanesque style. The cruciform churches of Norman architecture often had deep chancels and a square crossing tower, which has remained a feature of English ecclesiastical architecture. England has many early cathedrals, most notably Winchester Cathedral (1079), York Minster (1080), Durham Cathedral (1093), and (New) Salisbury Cathedral (1220). After a fire damaged Canterbury Cathedral in 1174, Norman masons introduced the Gothic style, which developed into the English Gothic at Wells and Lincoln Cathedrals around 1191. Oxford and Cambridge began as religious schools in the 11th and 13th centuries, respectively.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: Henry VIII was named Defender of the Faith ("Fidei Defensor") for his opposition to Luther's Reformation. The fact he had no living son and the pope's inability to permit him a divorce from his wife while her nephew's armies held Rome, however, prompted Henry to summon the Reformation Parliament and to invoke the statute of praemunire against the English Church, ultimately leading to the 1532 Submission of the Clergy and the 1534 Acts of Supremacy that made the Church of England an independent national church, no longer under the governance of the Pope, but with the King as Supreme Governor. (It is sometimes incorrectly stated that the Church of England was established at this time. The Church of England was a province of the Catholic Church at least since c. 600 AD. when Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. Therefore the Church of England could not have been established at a time when it had existed for over 900 years.) A law passed the same year made it an act of treason to publicly oppose these measures; SS John Fisher and Thomas More and many others were martyred for their continued Catholicism. Fear of foreign invasion was a concern until the 1588 rout of the Spanish Armada, but land sales after the Dissolution of the lesser and greater monasteries united most of the aristocracy behind the change. Religious rebellions in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in 1536, in Cumberland in 1537, and in Devon and Cornwall in 1549 were quickly dealt with. The doctrine of the English Reformation differed little at first except with regard to royal authority over canon law: Lutheranism remained condemned and John Frith, Robert Barnes, and other Protestants were also martyred, including William Tyndale, whose "Obedience of a Christian Man" inspired Henry's break with Rome and whose translation of the Bible formed the basis of Henry's own authorised Great Bible. Meanwhile, laws in 1535 and 1542 fully merged Wales with England.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: For the next 150 years, religious policy varied with the ruler: Edward VI and his regents favored greater Protestantism, including new books of Common Prayer and Common Order. His sister Mary restored Catholicism after negotiations with the pope ended Rome's claims to the former Church lands, but two false pregnancies left her sister Elizabeth I as her heir. Upon Elizabeth's ascension, the 1558 Act of Uniformity, 1559 Act and Oath of Supremacy, and the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 formed the Religious Settlement which restored the Protestant Church of England. The vicissitudes of the clergy during the period were satirised in "The Vicar of Bray". The papal bull "Regnans in Excelsis" supporting the Rising of the North and the Irish Desmond Rebellions against Elizabeth proved ineffective, but similarly ineffective were the Marian exiles who returned from Calvin's Geneva as Puritans. James I supported the bishops of Anglicanism and the production of an authoritative English Bible while easing persecution against Catholics; several attempts against his person—including the Bye & Gunpowder Plots—finally led to harsher measures. Charles I provoked the Bishops' Wars in Scotland and ultimately the Civil War in England. The victorious Long Parliament restructured the Church at the 1643 Westminster Assembly and issued a new confession of faith. (The English Baptists drew up their own in 1689.) Following the Restoration, onerous Penal Laws were enacted against Dissenters, including the Clarendon Code. Charles II and James II tried to declare royal indulgences of other faiths in 1672 and in 1687; the former was withdrawn in favour of the first Test Act, which—along with the Popish Plot—led to the Exclusion Crisis, and the latter contributed to the Glorious Revolution of 1688.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: The religious settlement of 1689 shaped policy down to the 1830s. The Church of England was not only dominant in religious affairs, but it blocked outsiders from responsible positions in national and local government, business, professions and academe. In practice, the doctrine of the divine right of kings persisted Old animosities had diminished, and a new spirit of toleration was abroad. Restrictions on Nonconformists were mostly either ignored or slowly lifted. The Protestants, including the Quakers, who worked to overthrow King James II were rewarded. The Toleration Act of 1689 allowed Nonconformists who have their own chapels, teachers, and preachers, censorship was relaxed.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: Harsh penalties on Catholicism remained until the threat of a French restoration of the Catholic Stuart kings ended, but they were seldom enforced, and afterwards were slowly lifted until Catholic emancipation was achieved in 1829. The failure of the pro-Catholic Jacobite rebellions and papal recognition of George III after the death of J.F.E. Stuart in 1766 permitted the gradual removal of anti-Catholic laws, a process known as the Catholic Emancipation, which included the Restoration of the English hierarchy.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: The evangelical movement inside and outside the Church of England gained strength in the late 18th and early 19th century. The movement challenged the traditional religious sensibility that emphasised a code of honor for the upper-class, and suitable behaviour for everyone else, together with faithful observances of rituals. John Wesley (1703 – 1791) and his followers preached revivalist religion, trying to convert individuals to a personal relationship with Christ through Bible reading, regular prayer, and especially the revival experience. Wesley himself preached 52,000 times, calling on men and women to "redeem the time" and save their souls. Wesley always operated inside the Church of England, but at his death, it set up outside institutions that became the Methodist Church. It stood alongside the traditional nonconformism of Presbyterians, Congregationalist, Baptists, Unitarians and Quakers. The earlier Nonconformists, however, were less influenced by revivalism.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: The Church of England remained dominant, but it had a growing evangelical, revivalist faction: the "Low Church". Its leaders included William Wilberforce and Hannah More. It reached the upper class through the Clapham Sect. It did not seek political reform, but rather the opportunity to save souls through political action by freeing slaves, abolishing the duel, prohibiting cruelty to children and animals, stopping gambling, avoiding frivolity on the Sabbath; they read the Bible every day. All souls were equal in God's view, but not all bodies, so evangelicals did not challenge the hierarchical structure of English society.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: As part of the regular census in 1851, the Government conducted a census in England and Wales of attendance at religious services on 30 March 1851. Reports were collected from local ministers who reported attendance at their services on 30 March 1851. The effect of individuals attending multiple services (morning/afternoon/evening) could not be fully accounted for, but the estimated number of individuals attending a service at some point in the day was 7,261,032 people. The number of individuals attending morning services was 4,647,482, and the total number of attendees (including duplicates) was 10,896,066. The total population at the time was 17.9 million.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: During the 18th century heyday of the First British Empire, Anglican and Methodist missionaries were active in the 13 American Colonies. The Methodists, led by George Whitefield, were the most successful and after the revolution and entirely distinct American Methodist denomination emerged that became the largest Protestant denomination in the new United States. A major problem for colonial officials was the demand of the Church of England to set up an American bishop; this was strongly opposed by most of the Americans and never happened. Increasingly colonial officials took a neutral position on religious matters, even in those colonies such as Virginia where the Church of England was officially established, but in practice controlled by laymen in the local vestries. After the Americans broke free, British officials decided to enhance the power and wealth of the Church of England in all the settler colonies, especially British North America (Canada).


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: During the New Imperialism of the 19th century, the London Missionary Society and others like it were active In the British Empire around the world, notably including the work of the Scotsman David Livingstone in Africa. New religious orders were also established within the Anglican fold.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: All the main denominations were involved in 19th-century missions, including the Church of England, the Presbyterians of Scotland, and the Nonconformists. Much of the enthusiasm emerged from the Evangelical revival. Within the Church of England, the Church Mission Society (CMS) originated in 1799 and went on to undertake activity all around the world, including in what became known as "the Middle East".


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: Missionary societies funded their own operations that were not supervised or directed by the Colonial Office. Tensions emerged between the missionaries and the colonial officials. The latter feared that missionaries might stir up trouble or encourage the natives to challenge colonial authority. In general, colonial officials were much more comfortable with working with the established local leadership, including the native religions, rather than introducing the divisive force of Christianity. This proved especially troublesome in India, were very few local elites were attracted to Christianity. In Africa, especially, the missionaries made many converts. By the 21st century there were more Anglicans in Nigeria than in England, and they were culturally and theologically much more conservative.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: Missionaries increasingly came to focus on education, medical help, and long-term modernisation of the native personality to inculcate European middle-class values. They established schools and medical clinics. Christian missionaries played a public role, especially in promoting sanitation and public health. Many were trained as physicians, or took special courses in public health and tropical medicine at Livingstone College, London.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: In the 20th century, the Liturgical and Ecumenical Movements were important developments. Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1903 to 1928, was perhaps the most influential of the churchmen.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: A curious case was Ernest Barnes (1874 – 1953), Anglican Bishop of Birmingham, who was a highly visible modernist opposed to Anglo-Catholic practices and rituals. He preached Darwinism and ridiculed many Christian beliefs, especially the sacrament of Holy Communion and the bodily Resurrection of Christ. This led to calls that he should resign as a bishop; he refused, but Davidson made a gentle attack on Barnes in an open letter.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: Although the overall population was growing steadily, and the Catholic membership was keeping pace, the Protestants were slipping behind. Out of 30-50 million adults, they dropped slowly from 5.7 million members in 1920, and 5.4 million in 1940, to 4.3 million in 1970. The Church of England decline was parallel. Methodism, the largest of the Nonconformists reached a peak of 841,000 members in Great Britain in 1910, slipped to 802,000 in 1920, 792,000 in 1940 729,000 in 1960, and 488,000 in 1980. The Nonconformists had built a strong base in industrial districts that specialised in mining textiles agriculture and fishing; those were declining industries, whose share of the total male workforce was in steady decline, from 21 per cent in 1921 to 13 per cent in 1951. As families migrated to southern England, or to the suburbs, they often lost contact with their childhood religion. Political reverberations were most serious for the Liberal Party, which was largely based in the Nonconformist community, and which rapidly lost membership in the 1920s as its leadership quarrelled, the Irish Catholics and many from the working-class moved to the Labour Party, and part of the middle class moved to the Conservative party. Hoping to stem the membership decline, the three major Methodist groups united in 1932. In Scotland the two major Presbyterian groups, the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church, merged in 1929 for the same reason. Nonetheless the steady declension continued. The Nonconformists showed not just a decline in membership but a dramatic fall in enthusiasm. Sunday school attendance plummeted; there were far fewer new ministers. Antagonism toward Anglicanism sharply declined, and many prominent Nonconformists became Anglicans, including some leading ministers. There was a falling away in the size and fervour of congregations, less interest in funding missionaries, a decline in intellectualism, and persistent complaints about the lack of money. Commentator D. W. Brogan reported in 1943:


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: One aspect of the long-term decline in religiosity was that Protestants showed increasingly less interest in sending their children to faith schools. In localities across England, fierce battles were fought between the Nonconformists, Anglicans, and Catholics, each with their own school systems supported by taxes, and secular schools, and taxpayers. The Nonconformists had long taken the lead in fighting the Anglicans, who a century before had practically monopolised education. The Anglican share of the elementary school population fell from 57 per cent in 1918 to 39 per cent in 1939. With the sustained decline in Nonconformist enthusiasm their schools closed one after another. In 1902, the Methodist Churches operated 738 schools; only 28 remained in 1996.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: Britain continued to think of itself as a Christian country; there were a few atheists or nonbelievers, but unlike the continent, there was no anti-clericalism worthy of note. A third or more prayed every day. Large majorities used formal Church services to mark birth, marriage and death. The great majority believed in God and heaven, although belief in hell fell off after all the deaths of the World War. After 1918, Church of England services stopped practically all discussion of hell.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: As anti-Catholicism declined sharply after 1910, the Catholic Church grew in numbers, grew rapidly in terms of priests and sisters, and expanded their parishes from intercity industrial areas to more suburban locales. Although underrepresented in the higher levels of the social structure, apart from a few old aristocratic Catholic families, Catholic talent was emerging in journalism and diplomacy. A striking development was the surge in highly publicised conversion of intellectuals and writers including most famously G. K. Chesterton, as well as Christopher Dawson, Maurice Baring, Ronald Knox, Sheila Kaye-Smith, William E. Orchard, Alfred Noyes, Rosalind Murray, Arnold Lunn, Eric Gill, David Jones, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Manya Harari, and Frank Pakenham.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: Present debates concern the ordination of women and the acceptance of homosexuality within the Church and clergy. The established church continues to count many more "baptised" members, although immigration from other countries means that the restored Catholic Church in England and Wales now has greater attendance at its weekly services.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: Whilst identifying significant decline in statistical data of church attendance from the 1950s onwards, Paul Backholer, author of "Britain, A Christian Country", found notable exceptions to the decline, which includes the up to two million people who attended Billy Graham's United Kingdom campaigns from 1954-55. With Wembley Stadium filled to overflowing with 120,000 people, Graham's meeting on Sunday 23 May 1954 was called, "Britain's biggest religious meeting of all time." Subsequent renewal movements include the Pentecostal movement, the Charismatic Renewal and more recently, rapid growth in ethnic minority churches. Whilst church attendance continues to decline, he concludes Britain remains, "Historically and culturally Christian in nature," something he notes is recognised by significant leaders of minority faiths in Britain, as an expression of tolerance.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: English Catholicism continued to grow throughout the first two thirds of the 20th century, when it was associated primarily with elements in the English intellectual class and the ethnic Irish population. Rates of attending Mass remained very high in stark contrast with the Anglican church and Nonconformist Protestant churches. Clergy numbers, which began the 20th century at under 3,000, reached a high of 7,500 in 1971.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: By the latter years of the 20th century low numbers of vocations also affected the church with ordinations to the priesthood dropping from the hundreds in the late 20th century into the teens in 2006–2011; 20 men were ordained to the diocesan priesthood in 2011 and 31 in 2012.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: The upward social movement of Irish Catholics out of the working-class into the middle-class suburban mainstream often meant their assimilation with broader, secular English society and loss of a separate Catholic identity. The Second Vatican Council has been followed, as in other Western countries, by divisions between traditional Catholicism and a more liberal form of Catholicism claiming inspiration from the Council. This caused difficulties for not a few pre-conciliar converts, though others have still joined the Church in recent decades (for instance, Malcolm Muggeridge and Joseph Pearce), and public figures (often descendants of the recusant families) such as Paul Johnson; Peter Ackroyd; Antonia Fraser; Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC; Michael Martin, first Catholic to hold the office of Speaker of the House of Commons since the Reformation; Chris Patten, first Catholic to hold the post of Chancellor of Oxford since the Reformation; Piers Paul Read; Helen Liddel, Britain's High Commissioner to Australia; and former Prime Minister's wife, Cherie Blair, have no difficulty making their Catholicism known in public life. The former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was received into full communion with the Catholic Church in 2007. Catherine Pepinster, Editor of "Tablet", notes: "The impact of Irish immigrants is one. There are numerous prominent campaigners, academics, entertainers (like Danny Boyle the most successful Catholic in showbiz owing to his film, "Slumdog Millionaire"), politicians and writers. But the descendants of the recusant families are still a force in the land."


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: During the 16th century, Scotland underwent a Protestant Reformation that created a Calvinist national Kirk, which became Presbyterian in outlook and severely reduced the powers of bishops. Remnants of Catholic and Episcopal religion remained, however. In the earlier part of the century, the teachings of first Martin Luther and then John Calvin began to influence Scotland, particularly through Scottish scholars, often training for the priesthood, who had visited Continental universities. The Lutheran preacher Patrick Hamilton was executed for heresy in St. Andrews in 1528. The execution of others, especially the Zwingli-influenced George Wishart, who was burnt at the stake on the orders of Cardinal Beaton in 1546, angered Protestants. Wishart's supporters assassinated Beaton soon after and seized St. Andrews Castle, which they held for a year before they were defeated with the help of French forces. The survivors, including chaplain John Knox, were condemned to be galley slaves in France, stoking resentment of the French and creating martyrs for the Protestant cause. Limited toleration and the influence of exiled Scots and Protestants in other countries, led to the expansion of Protestantism, with a group of lairds declaring themselves Lords of the Congregation in 1557 and representing their interests politically. The collapse of the French alliance and English intervention in 1560 meant that a relatively small, but highly influential, group of Protestants were in a position to impose reform on the Scottish Church. A confession of faith, rejecting papal jurisdiction and the mass, was adopted by Parliament in 1560, while the young Mary, Queen of Scots, was still in France.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: Knox, having escaped the galleys and spent time in Geneva as a follower of Calvin, emerged as the most significant figure of the period. The Calvinism of the reformers led by Knox resulted in a settlement that adopted a (partial) Presbyterian polity and rejected most of the elaborate trappings of the medieval Church. The reformed Kirk gave considerable power to local lairds, who often had control over the appointment of the clergy. There were widespread, but generally orderly outbreaks of iconoclasm. At this point the majority of the population was probably still Catholic in persuasion and the Kirk found it difficult to penetrate the Highlands and Islands, but began a gradual process of conversion and consolidation that, compared with reformations elsewhere, was conducted with relatively little persecution.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: In the 1690s the Presbyterian establishment purged the land of Episcopalians and heretics, and made blasphemy a capital crime. Thomas Aitkenhead, the son of an Edinburgh surgeon, aged 18, was indicted for blasphemy by order of the Privy Council for calling the New Testament "The History of the Imposter Christ"; he was hung in 1696. Their extremism led to a reaction known as the "Moderate" cause that ultimately prevailed and opened the way for liberal thinking in the cities.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: The early 18th century saw the beginnings of a fragmentation of the Church of Scotland—which was reconstituted on a fully Presbyterian basis after the Glorious Revolution. These fractures were prompted by issues of government and patronage, but reflected a wider division between the hard-line Evangelicals and the theologically more tolerant Moderate Party. The battle was over fears of fanaticism by the former and the promotion of Enlightenment ideas by the latter. The Patronage Act of 1712 was a major blow to the evangelicals, for it meant that local landlords could choose the minister, not the members of the congregation. Schisms erupted as the evangelicals left the main body, starting in 1733 with the First Secession headed by figures including Ebenezer Erskine. The second schism in 1761 lead to the foundation of the independent Relief Church. These churches gained strength in the Evangelical Revival of the later 18th century. a key result was the main Presbyterian church was in the hands of the Moderate faction, which provided critical support for the Enlightenment in the cities.


title: History of Christianity in Britain

text: Long after the triumph of the Church of Scotland in the Lowlands, Highlanders and Islanders clung to an old-fashioned Christianity infused with animistic folk beliefs and practices. The remoteness of the region and the lack of a Gaelic-speaking clergy undermined the missionary efforts of the established Church. The later 18th century saw some success, owing to the efforts of the SSPCK missionaries and to the disruption of traditional society. Catholicism had been reduced to the fringes of the country, particularly the Gaelic-speaking areas of the Highlands and Islands. Conditions also grew worse for Catholics after the Jacobite rebellions and Catholicism was reduced to little more than a poorly-run mission. Also important was Scottish Episcopalianism, which had retained supporters through the civil wars and changes of regime in the 17th century. Since most Episcopalians had given their support to the Jacobite rebellions in the early 18th century, they also suffered a decline in fortunes.