By Harold Henderson
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“What was . . . a somewhat artificial parliament in 1893 is today the reality of Chicago,” writes Harvard religion professor Diana Eck in her contribution to the new anthology Religion and American Culture. “The metropolitan yellow pages list dozens of entries under the headings ‘Churches: Buddhist’ or ‘Churches: Islamic.’ There are said to be seventy mosques in Chicago today and almost half a million Muslims. The suburbs of the city boast two sizable and elaborate Hindu temples, to say nothing of the dozen smaller places of Hindu worship. There are at least twenty Buddhist temples and meditation halls–from those of the Japanese Zen tradition to those of the Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Laotian Buddhist refugee communities. There is a Zoroastrian fire temple. There are Baha’is and Jains, Sikhs and Afro-Caribbean Voodoo practitioners. The Chicago planning committee convened nearly fifty cosponsoring religious groups to organize the centennial of the Parliament in 1993. This local committee, called the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, was more representative of the world’s religions than the [1893] Parliament itself had been.”
If you want to visit a state park to get away from it all, avoid Illinois Beach: last year it had by far the highest attendance of any Illinois state park, 2.5 million. The runner-up park had only 1.9 million visitors.
Hey! Somebody’s been proofreading with the spell checker again! A locally published economic-development book laments that practitioners often settle for what has always been done: “Lacking the needed expertise, development professionals have accepted the statuesque far too long.”
