Spirituality is no different from what we've been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. It's just ordinary stuff.
During the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica in the 16th century, the Catholic Church's Friar Diego de Landa supervised the burning of hundreds of Maya codices - fig-bark books rich in mythological and astronomical information. Only four Maya codices are known to have survived.
The idea of music coming from the Church is not new.
Singing actually came first. As a kid, I grew up singing in church and around the house.
Whether a person is straight or gay, Republican, Democrat, good person, not a good person, they're all welcome, because to me, church is a place you're supposed to get healed and whole and loved.
For reasons I can't remember, my family eventually stopped attending church, and I started questioning the Catholic Church's beliefs. I dabbled a little, but nothing stuck.
Looking back, I am grateful for so many friends who helped me in my youth to gain a testimony of the restored Church of Jesus Christ. First, I exercised simple faith in their testimonies, and then I received the divine witness of the Spirit to my mind and to my heart.
I moved back to Buffalo in 2009, and I had this moment where I wanted to have the best of both worlds. I wanted to be able to be in church and cook at home but then still get on a plane and fly back to New York and be this supermodel.
I understood that the Church had a Heart, and that this Heart was burning with love.
My grandmother took me to church on Sunday all day long, every Sunday into the night. Then Monday evening was the missionary meeting. Tuesday evening was usher board meeting. Wednesday evening was prayer meeting. Thursday evening was visit the sick. Friday evening was choir practice. I mean, and at all those gatherings, we sang.
The Reformation did not directly touch the question of the true character of God's church.
I went to a fundamentalist Christian high school and went to a fundamentalist church, and they were the greatest people; there was an amazing sense of community. The problem is when the messiness of real life enters, and the inflexibility of a moral code cannot cope with the realities of moral relativism.
I just wanted to sing, in church or wherever.
In a long meter hymn, a singer - they call it 'lays out a line.' And then the whole church joins in in repeating that line. And they form a wall of harmony so tight, you can't wedge a pin between it.
It's troubling for me as a Catholic to be at odds with the church.
We from every religion feel comfortable in Britain because there is a host. The Church of England is a good host, it has been a major force in shaping England into such a tolerant society.
These days, gun violence can strike anywhere, from a church hall in Charleston to a movie theatre or a Planned Parenthood office in Colorado. But our response to it depends on whether that violence is understood to be terrorism.
I'm not practising, I don't go to church, but what I got from it was a sense of belonging to something bigger. What I really miss is being forced to be in a community with people that aren't the same as you. Then, you really have to work through the ways that you're different.
My parents always made me dress up for church. I really didn't want to.
My sense is if the Episcopal Church can't stand challenge within its own ranks, then it is not a church I would want to be a member of anyway.
Undoubtedly, church fish fries and picnics help build social cohesion. It was at my dad's medium-size evangelical church - my first real exposure to a sustained religious community - that I first saw people of different races and classes worshiping together.
I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed... anything that could be counted, I did.
I was reared in the church, in the Presbyterian Church.
I started saying things in church that didn't meet with a lot of approval - like 'Jesus isn't coming back.' They started throwing Bibles.
I was raised as a Catholic, but I didn't like the Catholic Church at all. I thought the nuns were mean.
You can plant a church and grow a church. That's not that hard to do, but it's harder to be a viable source of transformation in a city or your time or space.
Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.
Free people make the only milieu possible in society for the full gift of one's self to church, state, and family. Free people enjoy and sustain and feel with one another because they live for one another. The paths of life are intermingled lives.
The words of confirmation into the Church are an invitation: 'Receive the Holy Ghost.' And that choice must be made not once, but every day, every hour, every minute.
I see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity.
I am a Catholic, not so committed to the church, but to the idea of the Virgin, the female face of God.
At age 11, I went to a Jewish school. I speak Yiddish. I'm Church of England Protestant. My father was Catholic, and my mother was Protestant. My wife is a Muslim.
People are so shocked when they find... out I am Protestant. I am Presbyterian. And I go to church, and I love God, and I love my church.
I grew up in the church. My mother was highly religious. I was singing at the age of five for big congregations.
For me, true beauty has nothing to do with wrinkles and everything to do with the fact that my maternal grandmother raised five children just after the war and remained a fighter throughout her life. True beauty is the slick of red lipstick my paternal grandmother would put on before going to church on Sunday.
I don't go to church any more, but I think that Catholicism is rather like the brand they use on cattle: I feel so formed in that Catholic mould that I don't think I could adopt any other form of spirituality. I still get feelings of consolation about churches.