Talk:Place of worship

message: I was wondering if we should make a seperate article  List of Names used for Places of Worship Warrior4321talk 01:14, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Seperate article? 

message: I'm pretty sure that the religiously neutral term for a place of worship is called a congregation. Am i right? if so, should the title be amended? Pass a Method talk 15:14, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I would regard a congregation as the group of people who congregate in a place of worship, and not as the place itself. alanyst 03:53, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thats because there are multiple definitions of that word. The current title sounds more like a sum of parts. As a compromise we could word it "congregations and places of worship" or something. Pass a Method talk 21:40, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

text: I also disagree with this; I believe "congregation" for the place/building rather than the group of people is a more restricted usage even than "church". In addition, it has the implication that the group is fixed or established; some places of worship do not have attached groups (such as wayfarers' chapels and many Asian temples). Yngvadottir (talk) 21:51, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Interesting question. Agree very much with Yngvadottir that a place of worship need not be attached to a particular congregation, for which my dictionary offers only meanings that have to do with groups of people. To me "congregation" and the "place of worship" are entirely separate concepts, and for reasons of scope shouldn't be linked as an article title, especially since I'm not sure I can recall any examples of people who worship together and who aren't Christians referring to themselves as a "congregation". Etymologically, a congregation is a gathering (from Latin grex, gregis, "flock, herd"); it's a group of people gathered to worship. (I always assumed the use of the word had to do with the Christian metaphor of the pastor, which is the Latin word for shepherd, and his flock.) A place of worship could be a building such as mosque or synagogue, or an open-air altar, or a shrine within a home (particularly in the Buddhist tradition), or a garden shrine on the edge of a parking lot at a Catholic hospital, or the rented stadium of a televangelist, or a tree, or crossroads (Compitalia, for an obscure example). If a church burns down (that is, if the place of worship is destroyed), you still have a congregation, which can move to another place of worship. In the colloquial speech of the U.S., you can say something like "Rolling Oaks Church will be having a picnic," which means of course the people of the church (the congregation), but that's a figure of speech (metonymy) like saying "the White House announced today …." The word that to me more readily means both "the place bound together in worship" and "the people bound together in worship" is "parish." But the article as it's currently structured seems rather strictly about place. Cynwolfe (talk) 22:32, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: That said, I looked at the article more closely, and there are a lot of problems. There are too many images for the amount of text, and many of the images aren't of places of worship: they show individuals praying, or small groups, with no sense of place. However, the photo of the Ganges is another reminder of how inclusive "place of worship" is, and how separate from the concept of "congregation." Cynwolfe (talk) 22:59, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: As another thought (sorry to go on so; I found this article unexpectedly fascinating), it seems to me that Christianity is unusual in the history of religion in regard to sacred space for worship. Because the earliest Christians had to practice their religion furtively, the community of believers had primacy over any physical place; that is, the congregation was "the Church" wherever it was. For that reason, as the article notes (without giving this historical background) some branches of faith avoid the term "church" for the building and prefer "hall" or some other word. The reverse seems true in Judaism: the centrality of the Temple of Jerusalem in Jewish history and identity causes some Jews to use "synagogue" and not "temple" for their place of worship, because there is only the one Temple conceptually. The religions of classical antiquity, however, are much more like the contemporary practices of China, Japan, India, Korea, or other countries that are primarily Buddhist or Hindu: all have a staggering number of places of worship, often including private shrines in the home, or small shrines integrated into the urban fabric like Starbucks (that is, ubiquitously). The medieval European cult of saints is heir to the classical tradition, in that saints are often tied to places as the old tutelary deities were; I have an interesting article on file by Alan Thacker called "Loca Sanctorum: The Significance of Place in the Study of the Saints," from Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West (Oxford UP, 2002), that points out how this is tied to relics, in that if you can't go to the saint, a bit of the saint comes to you to be housed, marking that place of worship as special. So in looking up the links in some of the sections, I came to feel that the article is potentially a fascinating overview of an important concept, if each section were treated summary style instead of as a random list. Shinto shrine, for instance, really opens up vistas on the concept of "place of worship". IMHO, the Christianity section right now is a mishmash list that's hard to read and navigate; if it were organized roughly chronologically, or in some kind of order based on the development of concepts, it might shed more light on why Christianity seems different in its (dis)regard of place. Cynwolfe (talk) 19:19, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  congregation 

message: The Islam buildings are very religious it also have a very unique character to it. The horseshoe arch became very popular in Islam structures, the Islamic people got there idea from a structure in Spain. Anytime a Muslim enters a mosque they must take off their shoes before entering. A place of worship is a specially designed place where individuals or a group of people go to perform acts of devotion etc.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.216.159.27 (talk) 15:33, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  The new place of Worship 

message: What is their other way? 124.104.145.187 (talk) 07:22, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Aside from worshipping their god at home and shrines, Shintoism 

message: What is agriculture 27.123.137.103 (talk) 23:58, 9 April 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:   agriculture