Secular Meeting Houses
For more details on this topic, see Colonial meeting house.In New England towns in the United States, there are meeting houses which serve as a sort of town or city hall, and are used for public meetings, voting, and town offices.
A meeting house may have a dual purpose as a place of worship and public discourse, as in early American Puritan congregations.
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Famous quotes containing the words secular, meeting and/or houses:
“... the generation of the 20s was truly secular in that it still knew its theology and its varieties of religious experience. We are post-secular, inventing new faiths, without any sense of organizing truths. The truths we accept are so multiple that honesty becomes little more than a strategy by which you manage your tendencies toward duplicity.”
—Ann Douglas (b. 1942)
“Then came the Lord Chamberlain with his white staff,
And all the people began to laugh;
And then the Queen began to speak,
Youre welcome home, Sir Francis Drake.”
—Unknown. Upon Sir Francis Drakes Return from His Voyage about the World, and the Queens Meeting Him (l. 58)
“It breedeth no small offence and scandal to see and consider upon the one part the curiosity and cost bestowed by all sorts of men upon their private houses; and on the other part the unclean and negligent order and spare keeping of the houses of prayer by permitting open decays and ruins of coverings of walls and windows, and by appointing unmeet and unseemly tables with foul cloths for the communion of the sacrament.”
—Elizabeth I (15331603)