Religion
Since its founding, Memphis has been home to persons of many different faiths. An 1870 map of Memphis shows religious buildings of the Baptist, Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Christian denominations and a Jewish congregation. Today, places of worship exist for Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus.
Baron Hirsch Synagogue, which was founded in Memphis in the late 19th century, has the largest congregation of Orthodox Jews in the United States.
Bellevue Baptist Church is a Southern Baptist megachurch in Memphis that was founded in the early 20th century. Its current membership is approximately 27,000. For many years, it was led by Adrian Rogers, a former three term president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
The international headquarters of the Church of God in Christ, one of the fastest growing sects of Christianity and the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States, is also in Memphis. The headquarters, Mason Temple (named after the denomination's founder, Charles Harrison Mason), is where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous I've Been to the Mountaintop speech the day before he was killed.
The denominational headquarters of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church are located in Memphis. Memphis is also home to the main Cumberland Presbyterian seminary, the Memphis Theological Seminary. The Cumberland Presbyterian church maintains a library and archival facility at the headquarters.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Memphis has its seat at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Memphis, founded as a parish in 1921.
The Episcopal Diocese of West Tennessee has its cathedral, St. Mary's in Memphis.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Memphis, Tennessee
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“There is more religion in men’s science than there is science in their religion.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Is there any religion but this, to know, that, wherever in the wide desert of being, the holy sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me? If none sees it, I see it; I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of the fact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and suspend my gloom, and my folly and jokes.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I read ... an article by a highly educated man wherein he told with what conscientious pains he had brought up all his children to be skeptical of everything, never to believe anything in life or religion or their own feelings without submitting it to many rational doubts, to have a persistent, thoroughly skeptical, doubting attitude toward everything.... I think he might as well have taken them out in the backyard and killed them with an ax.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)