This research examines the Methodist faith. The research will give an account of the historical an cultural context and current status of Methodism as a faith and also discuss attendance at a Methodist ritual service.
One of the most serious challenges facing any comparative study of religion, particularly for the person of faith, is the impulse to break with scholarly objectivity and embrace an ethos of evaluation that has the effect of making undue assumptions or judgments about the objects of investigation. The lessons of tolerance and humility in the face of the faith of those who to a student of religion who is also a person of faith, and more than this a professed Christian, may seem alien or even dangerous merely because their beliefs are "Other" are difficult to learn.
Yet the obligation remains, as injunctions from both biblical and secular sources attest:
What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah, 6.8)
Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted (Matt. 23.12)
In heads replete with thoughts of other men;
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own. . . .
Knowledge is proud that he has learn'd so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.
--William Cowper, The Winter Walk at Noon, Book 6
This study began as a strategy for enlarging personal religious understanding and developed into a project of widening the scope of understanding of and tolerance toward the substance of religious presentation in contemporary civil society. To the extent that a Catholic background informed that project, one could say that the institutions and commandments of the Church loom large against the prospect of truly engaging with a non-Catholic faith. However, in this period of American history--when much personal and cultural identity seems to be bound up with religion and when the strict moral tradit...