Final Thoughts on My Cathedral Tour

Part 9: The Cathedrals of Downtown Minneapolis

This is part 9 of a multi-part series.

Just some random thoughts here to close things out.

I visited 7 churches on my “cathedral” tour. One was actually a cathedral, and the basilica was a cathedral at one point in the past. My use of the word “cathedral” here was a bit of a gimmick to get your attention, but it also reflects the fact that all of the churches I chose to visit are all truly magnificent buildings.

I really wanted to include some Orthodox churches on my tour. There are plenty in Minneapolis, including Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, and Ethiopian. None of them are located in the downtown. I was hoping to extend the tour to some of these, and to some really nice looking church buildings just outside of the downtown area, but the seven churches I covered really turned out to be a lot. Visiting churches has been a ton of fun, and I think I will make a point of blogging on a church or two when I go to visit other cities.

I don’t think I could ever really join any of these church communities, because they all espouse beliefs that are in contradiction to mine. A common sticking point for me is belief in the Bible as the the divinely inspired word of God, often to the exclusion of other books. The idea that we would take any such book as some absolute truth, without looking at all at the historicity or literary criticism of the text, seems somewhat beyond naive to me, and wholly inappropriate for our modern times. This does not mean books such as the Bible are not sacred, or fountains of spiritual knowledge! It means we put things in the appropriate context. Other beliefs, such as Jesus rising from the dead, I can accept as truth in a mythological sense. But taking the Bible as literal truth is a chasm between me and these churches that cannot easily be bridged.

Doing this cathedral tour, and writing it up, has been such a wonderful experience for me. I’ve learned a lot about Christian churches, and a bit about the history of Minneapolis as well. While it was completely worth it, it was a lot of work for me, emotionally, spiritually, and in terms of my writing. I really want to get back to my book, and there are other things I need to blog about as well.

Well, that’s about it! Thanks for sticking with me to the end!