Tsuyu Tenjinsha Shrine (Ohatsu Tenjin), Osaka

Posted on April 13, 2025 by admin

Tucked away in the Umeda district of Osaka – a sort of downtown, with a heavy concentration of office, hotels and retail, along with the city’s busiest train station – is a Shinto shrine whose early history tends to be described (in English, anyway) using such phrases as “said to be” and “legend has it.”

While crossing on a pedestrian overpass a few days after arriving in Japan, I noticed the main torii for Tsuyu Tenjinsha Shrine (Ohatsu Tenjin). I must have visited the shrine in the 1990s. But when I got there this time, I had no memory of it. An odd feeling.

Clearly not ancient construction, or even that old. The U.S. Army Air Corps swept the area with a broom of fire in 1945, necessitating a reconstruction a decade or so later. A machine translation from the shrine web site tells of its hazy early centuries.

“[The] shrine was established on its current site, which was one of the small islands in Osaka Bay, to worship Sumiyoshi Sumuji Sone no Kami, and it is one of the former sites of the Naniwa Yasoshima Festival…

“The date of its founding is unclear, but since the Naniwa Yasoshima Festival can be traced back to the third year of the Kasho era (850) during the reign of Emperor Montoku, and the area is said to have been in place by the time of Emperor Kinmei in the sixth century, the origins of this shrine can be inferred to date back to that time.”

One of many such old shrines dotting the Kansai, in other words, many of which may still be around but which are still small, honoring obscure kami. But this one happened to be at the heart of Osaka during the Meiji era boom, and apparently grew with the city.

“The opening of the first Osaka Station in 1894 and Hankyu Railway Umeda Station in 1905 spurred the development of the area, and this shrine has come to be revered as the central guardian deity of Umeda and Sonezaki, in the heart of Osaka’s ‘kita’ [north] area,” the shrine notes.

That may be, but that isn’t why many people go there in our time. They go to offer prayers asking for better fortune in their romantic lives, whatever form that might take. Since I visited only a few days ahead of St. Valentine’s Day – another example of any number of cross-cultural WTFs you can find in Japan – the shrine was thick with prayers written on pink paper hearts.

I understand these slightly more permanent wooden plaques, known as ema, are young girls praying for beauty.

Why is this shrine associated with romance? That’s better attested, and something of an accident of history.

“Today the shrine is better known for its romantic associations, as it is a key setting of the bunraku puppet play: The Love Suicides of Sonezaki,” notes Osaka Station.

“The play tells the tragic story of two star-crossed lovers, the geisha Ohatsu and the apprentice trader Tokubei, and it was supposedly based on a historical double suicide that took place at the shrine in 1703. In the play an unfortunate combination of family pressures, financial misfortune, and the betrayal of a friend, threaten to keep the lovers apart. Unable to live without each other, they meet at the shrine and take their own lives.”

What is the opposite of star-crossed lovers, anyway? Star-aligned, maybe; one of those couples who end up celebrating a diamond anniversary without having grown to hate each other.

The popular name of the shrine, Ohatsu Tenjin, refers to the geisha of the story. Ohatsu and Tokubei are acknowledged at the shrine.

The shrine is surrounded by the buildings of Umeda and from its precincts you can exit into a shopping street. As with most such pedestrian streets in Japan, there are many small eateries.

I didn’t go there, but I can’t say I wasn’t curious.

Jewish Museum in Prague

Posted on April 3, 2025 by admin

One good thing about the historic core of Prague, at least for old visitors, are the small squares (náměstí?) with benches and sometimes trees. Walkability doesn’t mean much if you can’t sit down at regular intervals, and old Prague provides that, unlike some other pedestrian-intense places on this trip (and I mean you, Osaka).

We stopped often at this one, often as our first rest out from the hotel. Once Jay waited here for a few minutes while I wisely went back to the hotel to fetch a cap to wear.

We stopped here more than once as well.

Of course, in early March, the air was distinctly cool, and the squares weren’t so green. Or quite so busy. The views from the first small square looked more like this.

During our first ramble through the old city on March 11, we came across this unnerving figure.

Kafka. Of course. Rub the shoes for luck? Isn’t there only one kind of luck for Kafka, and it isn’t good? The bronze dates from 2003 and inspired by one of his lesser-known stories, “Description of a Struggle,” which I haven’t read, but which sounds Kafkaesque all right.

I had to look up the sculptor, Jaroslav Róna, a resident of Prague and a member of its small but enduring Jewish community. Looks like he specializes in unsettling figures, so Kafka would be right up his alley.

I don’t know whether it is coincidence or not, but the statue happens to be near the Spanish Synagogue (Španělská synagoga). An exceptional piece of work, dating from 1868, built on the site of a much older synagogue. There has been a Jewish community in the city since at least the 10th century of the Common Era.

Now a museum, the Spanish Synagogue – referring to the Moorish Revival style – is part of the Jewish Museum in Prague, which oversees a half-dozen or so structures in the former Jewish quarter, including the aforementioned Pinkas Synagogue and Old Jewish Cemetery.

After decades of misuse and neglect, beginning with the Nazis and continuing under the Communists, the Spanish Synagogue was restored not long after the Velvet Revolution. It is magnificent.

The view from the upper level.

Another synagogue-turned-museum is the Maisel Synagogue (Maiselova synagoga).

What would a Jewish museum in Prague be without mentioning everyone’s favorite clay man animated by one of the names of the Lord? On display at the Maisel.

An active congregation gathers at the Old-New Synagogue (Staronová Synagoga), another of the historic structures.

It was once the New Synagogue, then there was a newer one; so it became Old-New, built in late 13th century of the Common Era. More than one source says that Staronová Synagoga is the oldest active synagogue in Europe.

Yes.

Humayun’s Tomb, Isa Khan’s Tomb, Delhi

Posted on March 31, 2025 by admin

Just outside the gates of Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi, I spotted postcards for a sale from a street vendor, which was a rarity. I paused to look. That was a mistake. Before you could say boo, several other vendors – those that didn’t even have a spot on the near the gates, but who carried their wares around – were in my face. Inexpensive jewelry-, souvenir- and tchotchke-wallas. The only thing for it was to keep moving.

We were at the tomb on February 19. As a Mughal emperor, Humayun (d. 1556) rated one of considerable splendor.

“Persian and Indian craftsmen worked together to build the garden-tomb, far grander than any tomb built before in the Islamic world,” notes UNESCO, for indeed the tomb complex is a World Heritage Site. “Humayun’s garden-tomb is an example of the charbagh (a four quadrant garden with the four rivers of Quranic paradise represented), with pools joined by channels.”

“The mausoleum itself stands on a high, wide terraced platform with two bay deep vaulted cells on all four sides,” UNESCO continues. “It has an irregular octagon plan with four long sides and chamfered edges. It is surmounted by a 42.5 m high double dome clad with marble flanked by pillared kiosks (chhatris) and the domes of the central chhatris are adorned with glazed ceramic tiles.

“The interior is a large octagonal chamber with vaulted roof compartments interconnected by galleries or corridors. This octagonal plan is repeated on the second storey. The structure is of dressed stone clad in red sandstone with white and black inlaid marble borders. Humayun’s garden-tomb is also called the ‘dormitory of the Mughals’ as in the cells are buried over 150 Mughal family members.”

A precursor to the Taj Mahal, it is said. I can see that. But Humayun wasn’t the only eminence to have a mausoleum on the grounds. There are others, such as that of Isa Khan (d. 1548), who was there first.

A more manageable-sized mausoleum.

Isa Khan wasn’t royalty, but rather a noble, in service of the short-lived Sur Empire, whom the Mughals eventually overcame.

Seems easier to appreciate the details in a smaller-scale edifice.

Not far from his tomb is a mosque named for him.

Also has some worthwhile detail.

Humayun and Isa Khan: Not on the same side in life, but in death good neighbors.

The Old Jewish Cemetery & The Pinkas Synagogue, Prague

Posted on March 27, 2025 by admin

Memory’s a dodgy bastard, so I’ll never be sure whether or not I saw souvenir golems for sale in Prague in 1994, when I bought a book of Golem stories. Maybe there were some, but those were the early years of the post-communist tourist economy. It takes a while to ramp up the tourist merch. I am sure, however, that I saw them in just about every gift shop we visited in the Czech capital in 2025. Some smaller, some larger, some gray, many the color of a dirty orange flower pot.

I decided not to buy one, though it might have been a good office-shelf companion to my figure of Ganesha or the meditating Bigfoot. But you never can be sure about golems, and since I don’t have the learning or wisdom of Rabbi Loew of Prague, the thing might get out of hand.

I also don’t remember any of the historic synagogues being open during my first visit. I’ve read that the nonprofit that manages them, the Jewish Museum in Prague, was only re-established in 1994, so I expect that most of the structures were still closed in those days.

One place that was open in ’94 was the Old Jewish Cemetery (Starý židovský hřbitov), but only for a glimpse.

Now you can take a stroll through the cemetery, which is adjacent to the Pinkas Synagogue (Pinkasova synagoga), on a stone path that snakes through the grounds. That’s one thing we did on March 11. It remains one of my favorite cemeteries.

I like the seeming chaos of the stones. Not only were people buried close to each other, they were interred in layers. I’ve read that as the cemetery grew more crowded, and use of an ossuary wasn’t an option, more soil was added, and new layers of the dead were added. You do notice, being there, that the ground tends to be higher than street level in most places, with the cemetery walls holding in the excess earth.

Burials occurred from the early 15th to the late 18th centuries. A few of the stones were also marked with modern plaques, denoting a notable permanent resident. Such as one Avigdor Kara (d. 1439).

Or Wolf Spira-Wedeles, mentioned here in passing. By the time he died (1715), some notables were receiving larger memorials, such as his.

I remembered to take a few black-and-whites.

Monochrome suits the texture and austere beauty of the Old Jewish Cemetery, I believe.

The adjacent Pinkas Synagogue hasn’t had a congregation in a long time. In our time, it serves as a memorial to the Czech Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Inside you can visit two floors.

On the walls on both floors are the names of the dead, and their birth and death dates, if known, inked by hand.

About 80,000 names in all.

Qutb Minar, Delhi

Posted on March 24, 2025 by admin

When it comes to historic ruins in Delhi, the Mughals aren’t the only game in town. Qutb Minar, a 238-foot pre-Mughal legacy of the Delhi Sultanate, rises above the southern part of the metro, part of a larger complex that’s a World Heritage Site. That was how it went for us as tourists in modern India. Another day, another World Heritage Site.

I’d say Qutb Minar deserves its modern status.

Casual visitors can’t climb to the top any more and I’m not sure I could have anyway. “Access to the top ceased after 2000 due to suicides,” asserts Wiki. But you can stand right under the tower and behold the detail, as we did on the afternoon of February 20.

Monumental structures this old come with extra layers of marvel, at least in my reckoning. It’s one thing to admire a tower like Tokyo Skytree or Burj Khalifa, which are certainly impressive, but whose construction also had the benefit of all sorts of machines and experts in their use — enormous cranes come to mind, as do CAD systems with more computing power than the entire Apollo program.

On the other hand, Qutb Minar is essentially an artful stack of brick, one of whose characteristics turned out to be longevity. I’m certain some machines were available for the task, but I also imagine much of the building involved human and animal power. How did builders beginning around AD 1200 – around what, AH 620? — undertake such a feat? It only goes to show that machines might augment the result, but technique lies in the human mind.

Various sources tell me that Qutb Minar counts as a minaret for the nearby Quwwatu’l-Islam mosque, built around the same time and now a ruin, and as a “victory tower.” That is, presumably to remind the local population who was in charge now: one Qutb al-Din Aibak, the Ghurid-aligned conqueror of Delhi and founder of the Delhi Sultanate, whose military efforts were part of the hard-to-follow wave of Central and South Asian conquests and counter-conquests that played across centuries now remote.

The Ghurids, who were Tajiks, seem to be one of those peoples that pop up in history with some regularity, a minor group from somewhere remote from most urbanized civilizations, suddenly expanding by conquering its neighbors and basically kicking butt for a few centuries across a wide area before fizzling out. They also had the distinction of being also first Muslim conquerors of north-central India.

Quwwatu’l-Islam is noted for any number of reasons, including its columns.

Their distinctiveness has been long noted. From Treasure spots of the world, by Walter Bentley Woodbury (1875): “… no two columns of this structure are alike, and this peculiarity applies also to the almost endless number forming the colonnade surrounding the building… the portico of the Quwwat ul-Islam Mosque framing the courtyard area consists of columns/pillars from destroyed Hindu and Jain temples…”

Views of the courtyard.

Details. including what look like restorations.

In the middle of the courtyard is the Iron Pillar, covered with faint inscriptions.

Three Raj-era tablets offer translation in Arabic, Hindi and English. Perhaps not up to the latest translation standards, but worth a read all the same.

The pillar is an echo of an even earlier time, created during the Gupta Empire in the fourth to the sixth centuries as reckoned by the Gregorian calendar, and thought to laud the warrior deeds and memory of Chandragupta II (d. 415), also known as Chandra. What is it doing at Quwwatu’l-Islam? Brought from somewhere else as a bit of loot by one ruler or another many years after its creation, though exactly who or when or from where are matters of scholarly debate.

More.

The grounds also include a surprising amount of green space.

We only spent a short time in Delhi, but it didn’t seem overloaded with green space.

Tokyo Skytree & Senso-ji

Posted on March 23, 2025 by admin

I’ve been seeing ads recently for a fine-looking daypack (carryon pack, the ad calls), since the bots surely know that I just did such things as take airplanes to far-flung destinations, use a credit card overseas and bought the likes of an e-sim. The daypack’s array of pockets and their layout seem useful, too. Then there’s the price: $300. No.

As if to try to answer my immediate objection, soon a new ad for the same item appeared: “Why would you buy a $300 pack?” it asks. I don’t stick around for the answer. I have a fine daypack already. More than one, in fact, were pressed into service during the RTW ’25. One went on my back into the airplane, the other, empty, was waiting in the checked bag for light duty during the trip.

For all the years I spent in Japan, Tokyo didn’t represent much of that time. All together I spent maybe a week there, including a delightful visit in November 1993: young marrieds out on a long weekend. Wish I could remember the name of the minshuku where we stayed, somewhere in the sprawl of Tokyo. I close my eyes and I can see its tidy lobby, paper walls, delicate prints, narrow dark stairs, tatami underfoot. Our hosts were most hospitable, from a long line of inn keepers, I think. On the wall was a framed drawing of a banjo by Pete Seeger, along with his signature. Some decades earlier, he had stayed there.

This time we stayed in a guest room at the residence of Kyoko and her husband and two nearly grown children not far from the University of Tokyo, and had a pleasant visit. Good to see old friends, wherever they are. Yuriko and Kyoko go way back. Kyoko spent time in Texas, Corsicana specifically, and we traveled with her to Arizona in ’97. After Lilly was born, she came to Chicago to help out for several weeks.

One thing we missed in the early ’90s was Tokyo Skytree, rising 2,080 feet over Sumida Ward, and for good reason: the tower was completed only in 2012 as a TV tower and a tourist attraction. We arrived in the afternoon of February 14.

Who has the wherewithal to build such things in the early 21st century? In Japan, anyway, railroad companies do, in this case Tobu Railway Co. Ltd., a Kanto regional line that offers some sweet destinations, including the mountain resort of Nikko and the hot springs around Kinugawa Onsen, both of which I only know by reputation. Naturally, Japanese RR companies are never just that, and in this case while transport remains a core business, the conglomerate also includes entertainment venues, hotels, a commercial real estate and construction arm, and retail operations, especially department stores at major terminals.

Judging by my previous and recent experience at the department stores owned by regional RRs, the department store not only isn’t dying in Japan, it flourishes. They are serving a much more dense population, of course, and one that travels by train, but there’s also that matter of stocking goods people want to buy, including basements full of exceptionally good food. The stores’ bustle is something American department stores can only dream about in their dying reverie.

Up in the Tokyo Skytree bulb are a couple of tourist observation decks. The combo ticket, while expensive, isn’t outrageously more than just visiting the lower deck, so we opted for access to the deck at 350 meters and the narrower one at 450 meters, one after the other. It turned out to be easier to take good pictures from the lower level.

Busy, but not sardine-can busy.

Now those are some views, showing just how dense metro Tokyo is.

Below is the Sumida River, which wasn’t always so densely populated.

Night on the Sumida River – Kobayashi Kiyochika, 1881

“Night on the Sumida River” by Kobayashi Kiyochika, 1881

Three hundred fifty meters high? That’s well and good, but nothing as impressive as more than a thousand feet: 1,150, to be almost exact.

Window washers came by as we looked out at 350 meters. Hanging, as far as I could tell, by two wires attached to their car, and not their persons. They seemed pretty blasé about that, but anyone who felt otherwise (like me) would be in the wrong line of work.

On the other side of the river, and visible from the tower, is Senso-ji temple, in the Asakusa neighborhood. We still had some afternoon light after visiting Skytree, so we decided to go to the temple, a short train ride and a longer walk away. A long pedestrian street (Nakamise-dōri) goes through Asakusa to the temple grounds.

Hōzōmon gate.

The temple’s other gate is known as Kaminarimon, and if I’d known about its noteworthiness, we’d have backtracked a bit to see it. Apparently we entered the Nakamise-dōri at the middle, and so missed Kaminarimon (and it took me a while to figure that out just today). Ah, well.

There has been a Buddhist temple on the site since our 7th century, with the usual history of fires and rebuilding down the centuries, including the most recent cycle in the 20th century. The early 1945 air raids destroyed the temple, but rebuilding was complete by the 1970s. Said to be one of the most-visited religious sites in the world, the temple has the advantage in that regard of being square within the world’s most populous metro.

The temple is dedicated to Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion, which might also help explain its popularity. Who doesn’t need some compassion sometimes? Kannon is popular when it comes temple dedications, with Shitennō-ji, Kiyomizu-dera and Sanjūsangen-dō also dedicated to Kannon, all in the Kansai region, and all of which I visited at one time or another.

The Main Hall.

No shortage of visitors.

Not a bad afternoon in Tokyo, visiting popular structures from the 21st and 7th centuries, respectively, and being fully alive in the present.

The Kamakura Daibutsu

Posted on March 17, 2025 by admin

Mere hours after I returned home on Friday evening, an intense burst of wind ’round midnight toppled the Wisconsin Buddha in my back yard, among other things, such as most of our back yard fence. Guess it’s better that I’m here to deal with the debris in the yard, calling our insurance company, etc.

Setting the Wisconsin Buddha upright was an easy part of cleaning up the back yard. Our little blue-green statue may serve as a reminder of the impermanence of things, but it hasn’t been completely destroyed by time. Yet.

You can also say the same for the much larger, much better known Kamakura Daibutsu, or the Big Buddha of Kamakura, a city on the edge of metro Tokyo-Yokohama. We visited on a cool and sunny, pleasant day in mid-February. It sure looks permanent, but you could say that’s illusion.

Something else to consider when you face a bronze of this heft: Does the size of a Buddha, or more exactly Buddharūpa (depictions of Buddha), matter when it comes to conveying Buddhist ideas?

I can’t call myself expert enough to answer that, but somehow I suspect not. When it comes to impermanence, my small Buddha would seem to have just as much to teach. Just not as many students.

The Big Buddha at Kamakura dates from a period in Japanese history known as the Kamakura period, which is all of our 13th century and more, and a time that, for a while anyway, this seaside town was the hub of government for the Japanese islands: an early shogunate, emerging from the winning side of a bloody war between clans, and in fact the moment in history when the samurai caste consolidated its power. How cool is that? We’re talking about a capital founded by samurai, for samurai.

Buddhist sects flowered under the new order, I think not coincidentally, and with enough vim to leave behind temples and memorials of all sorts in the region – such as the massive bronze Daibutsu. These days, it attracts tourists in numbers probably undreamed of by earlier centuries, when trickles of pilgrims or scholars or mystics came.

The seated Buddha, 43 feet or so to the top of his head, weighs about as much as seven and a half Mack trucks with trailers. It is an Amida Buddha that began as a large long-gone wooden statue, a structure much more impermanent than the bronze that came later (about AD 1252), its existence due to a vigorous new branch of Pure Land Buddhism in Japan in Kamakura times. Down the centuries since then, various halls built around the giant have burned down and been rebuilt (but ultimately not) and the statue itself has been damaged in earthquakes and floods and repaired and restored and listed as a special site, including part of a nomination as a World Heritage Site.

Nice peripheral details.

For ¥50 extra, about 50 cents, you can go inside. For a moment, I was giddy as a schoolboy. I get to go inside a giant, ancient Japanese statue?

The status shows its age – how susceptible it is to the passage of time – its impermanence – more in there.

Looking into the head of the Kamakura Daibutsu.

Outside again. How is it that the metal giant has such graceful lines?

It’s popular.

Having your photo made at a tourist site: near universal, isn’t it? It’s regarded as tinged with silliness, this custom. Some people think that, anyway.

No. Revel in it.

Corpus Christi Cathedral

Posted on January 22, 2025 by admin

First stop last Thursday in Corpus Christi, Texas: Corpus Christi Cathedral, which is in downtown on a rise that’s probably good protection against hurricanes.

The cathedral was dedicated in 1940. That’s later than a lot of cathedrals, but not so recent that modernism enters the picture, such as at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels in Los Angeles. Previously, the seat of Catholic Diocese of Corpus Christi had been at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but when it was damaged by fire in 1938, the church tasked Oklahoma architect Charles Monnot (d. 1962) to design a new one.

“Monnott – a devout Catholic — showed much interest and talent in designing places of worship,” says the Cultural Landscape Foundation. “During the early decades of the twentieth century, when the Catholic church was building extensively across several southwestern states, Monnot was designated as the architect on a multitude of projects.”

Besides Corpus Christi, he did the Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, seat of the Oklahoma City Archdiocese, and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Little Flower in San Antonio, as well as other churches, monasteries, chapels, and convents in Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and Colorado.

Spanish Colonial Revival style, it’s called. A stylized interpretation of early Spanish missions. It has a handsome interior.

The floor.

There is a good collection of stained glass. Such as the loafs and fishes, miracle of.

St. Pius X, who established the Diocese of Corpus Christi, and Pius IX, figures I haven’t seen that often in stained glass.

But not never: At the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Chicago, Pius IX is seen promulgating Ineffabilis Deus, which defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. He’s probably doing that in the Corpus Christi window as well, and not handling the famed laundry list in the Sordidum Lauandi Dei incident, in which Pius refused to have the papal laundry done outside the Vatican walls after the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy and the loss of the Papal States in 1870.

Tannenbaum ’24

Posted on December 15, 2024 by admin

The Christmas tree business is still mostly fragmented, with some 16,600 farms growing Christmas trees on nearly 300,000 acres in the United States, according to the 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture. Some farms are large – a wholesaler called Holiday Tree Farms in Oregon’s Willamette Valley asserts that it ships 1,000,000 trees a year, grown on 1,500 acres. But no single entity dominates.

Good thing, too. If an outfit called CTree Group controlled, say, 50 percent of the market, we’d have to buy an annual subscription to receive our trees in December.

The cash money I spent today at a Christmas tree lot with no name here in the northwest suburbs pretty much went straight into the pocket of the farmer. And I mean that literally. That’s where he put it.

He and his (I assume) wife, both of whom looked roughly my age, except more grizzled from spending much more time outside, were stationed at the small trailer, taking money, chain-sawing the stumps and netting the whole trees, for easier transport. These things they did for me. I asked whether theirs were Michigan trees. Over the years, some of our trees have been, including those from the UP. No, Wisconsin. Just as good, I told them.

The thought that the money goes directly to the owner makes it less annoying that the price was up again this year ($70), and that many trees in the lot were priced at over $100, a price I’m sure not to pay. But not completely un-annoying.

The lot, as many are, is set up on an underutilized section of parking in a nondescript strip center. But not completely nondescript. I was glad to see the record store is still there, though I’ve never been in.

I hadn’t noticed this before, also in the strip center.

An organization I’d never heard of. Even so, I have to admit the name Mountain of Fire & Miracles Ministries has a peel of thunder and a whiff of brimstone about it. Makes you sit up and pay attention.

Some detail.

I took it for an independent Protestant sect of the homegrown sort, but no. This location is an outpost of MFM, a Nigerian Protestant sect – at least, in the sense that it isn’t Catholic — founded in 1989. Here’s something from the church’s web site, under “Mission and Vision” as one of the objectives of the ministry:

To build an aggressive end-time army for the Lord. MFM is an end-time church where we build an aggressive end-time army for the Lord. An end-time church is a church where a sinner enters with two options: he either repents or does not come back, contrary to the present day church where sinners are comfortable and find things so easy and convenient.

I don’t know much about the organization, not really, considering how ignorant I am about most things Nigerian. Still, its presence tells me that there must be more Nigerians here in the northwest suburbs than I realized. The world not only comes to Chicago, it comes to the Chicago suburbs.

Chapel of the Transfiguration

Posted on October 4, 2024 by admin

The place to contemplate the great outdoors is usually outdoors. But not quite always.

About a month ago, we entered Grand Teton National Park at the Moose Entrance. Not far inside the park is the Chapel of the Transfiguration.

Rustic, the style is called. A picture window behind the altar, looking toward the Cathedral Group of mountains, was clearly no accident. Liturgical east in this case points to the grandeur of Creation.

The chapel has stood in this spot in Wyoming for nearly 100 years, built to serve guests at the various dude ranches that existed in the area before it was a national park. Grand Teton became a national park in 1929, with President Coolidge inking the bill at the tail end of his administration, but even then the chapel wasn’t in the park, which didn’t expand down to Moose until 1950.

Transfiguration is an Episcopal chapel, associated with St. John’s Episcopal Church in Jackson, Wyoming. St John’s, a large log structure over 100 years old, is just off the busy main street in that town, a little apart from the many shops and restaurants and attractions. We spent a while in Jackson before entering the Grand Teton NP, including a visit to St. John’s.

The church was open, but no one else was there. If any place qualifies as the beaten path, Jackson, Wyoming is it. And as usual, it took about a minute to get off the beaten path.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Religious Sites