I still call them "church shoes"...

"Religion makes one shutter. Religion makes me shudder. Even in America where statistics show consistently a huge percentage of th’inhabitants believe in Something Big up there helping us Timid Little Ordinary Ones down here grow our Perfect Cabbages, even in America I never believe anybody except Wallace Stevens actually goes to church. Went." --John Latta (see Thursday, December 11, toward the end of the post. His archive links don't work.)

Stephens went to church, notably St. Patick's Cathedral in New York--but mostly when it was empty, if I recall correctly. He referred to himself as an "old dried-up Presbyterian" and asserted that "loss of faith is growth." "Sunday Morning" is "an expression of paganism" or "naturalistic religion as an alternative to supernaturalism." He referred to the idea that "the enternal God is thy refuge" as "a potent illusion" on which he might depend if he lived "in one of the smaller communties." But he had fond memories of watching the organist at Sunday School, and remembered his Sunday shoes and the oysters afterward. The priest who attended him on his deathbed says he converted to Catholocism just before finally succumbing to his cancer, but his daughter denies it.



My whole hometown is literally church/gas station/strip mall/motel/church/gas station/strip mall/motel etc. with the occasional lumber yard studding the mix. The newspaper runs a daily bible verse at the bottom of the front page (See it? It's still there!) As a young kid, especially if you live in the boonies, church is one of the rare social opportunities to see your friends outside of school, and there's usually a good meal after it. We had a gym, a basketball court, a racketball court, an air hockey table, and were too young to go to bars (not that there were any in our dry county) or do anything unsupervised. The youth rec center was free--even cheaper than the Taco Bell parking lot. But by high school, we'd mostly all dumped church and were hanging out in corn fields or climbing the water towers.



I like a church, when there's nobody there. The architecture of churches. Appreciation for what I'd call "church diction," especially of the Southern Baptists (um, not that I AGREE with them). My pawpaw was a preacher. But as for religion, I agree about the shuddering.