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.
Read more about this topic: Meeting House
Famous quotes containing the words secular, meeting and/or houses:
“When a woman starts out in the world on a mission, secular or religious, she should leave her feminine charms at home.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)
“They had met, and included in their meeting the thrust of the manifold grass stems, the cry of the peewit, the wheel of the stars.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“In America the taint of sectarianism lies broad upon the land. Not content with acknowledging the supremacy as the Diety, and with erecting temples in his honor, where all can bow down with reverence, the pride and vanity of human reason enter into and pollute our worship, and the houses that should be of God and for God, alone, where he is to be honored with submissive faith, are too often merely schools of metaphysical and useless distinctions. The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)