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Chicago

Also Known As Chicagoan
United States

Chicago's place in religious history rests largely on the World's Parliament of Religions, held there in 1893 alongside the World's Columbian Exposition. It was the first large gathering to put representatives of many traditions on a single platform, and the occasion of Vivekananda's introduction of Vedanta to an American audience. A centenary parliament in the same city in 1993 produced the declaration Towards a Global Ethic, and the Newberry Library in Chicago holds manuscript collections important to the study of religion.

Facts
Origins
Founded
Incorporated in 1837 at the portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi system, and rebuilt after the fire of 1871 1
Origin of the Name
Derives from a Miami-Illinois word for a wild garlic or onion that grew abundantly along the river, first recorded in French explorer accounts of the late seventeenth century. 1
Attributions
Tradition
The Catholic and Lutheran churches of its European immigration; the Black Protestant churches of the Great Migration, in which gospel music took its modern form; the Nation of Islam, headquartered in the city; and the World's Parliament of Religions, held there in 1893 2
Traditions
Sacred and Liturgical Languages
English, with Latin, German, Polish and Church Slavonic long used in the immigrant congregations 3
Learn More
The World's Parliament of Religions, 1893

The Parliament sat for seventeen days in September 1893, in the newly built hall on the lakefront that is now the Art Institute, as one of the congresses attached to the World's Columbian Exposition. Nothing on that scale had been attempted: delegates of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Shinto, Islam, Judaism and a long list of Christian bodies addressed the same audience from the same platform, and the proceedings were published and read far beyond the city.

Two things are usually remembered about it. The first is the reception of Vivekananda, a young Bengali monk with no delegation behind him, whose opening address was received with an ovation and who spent the following years lecturing across the United States, founding the first Vedanta societies in the West. The second is that the meeting introduced an American public to Buddhism through speakers including Anagarika Dharmapala of Ceylon and the Rinzai abbot Soyen Shaku, whose connection to Chicago publishing later carried D. T. Suzuki to the United States.

The Parliament's frame was less neutral than its billing. It was organised by liberal Protestants, opened and closed with Christian prayer, and its chairman assumed that comparison would demonstrate the superiority of his own tradition. The Archbishop of Canterbury declined to take part on the ground that Christianity is not one religion among many. Delegates from Asia used the platform to answer missionary accounts of their traditions directly, which is a large part of why the event mattered.

A City of Foundings, from Gospel Music to the Nation of Islam

Chicago's religious importance did not end with the Parliament. The Great Migration brought several hundred thousand African Americans north between the wars, and their churches remade the city's religious life. Thomas A. Dorsey, a blues pianist who turned to sacred music, worked from Pilgrim Baptist Church and, with singers including Mahalia Jackson, established gospel as a composed and published form rather than only a congregational one; the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses was founded in the city in 1933. Storefront congregations multiplied alongside the large churches, and the tension between the two shaped what black Protestant worship in northern cities became.

The same migration carried new movements. Elijah Muhammad led the Nation of Islam from Chicago from the 1930s, and its headquarters and principal mosque remain there, so the organisation's doctrinal and institutional centre has always been this city rather than New York, where its best known minister worked.

Other traditions built their American centres nearby. The Bahai House of Worship at Wilmette on the lakeshore north of the city, begun in 1920 and dedicated in 1953, was the first in the western hemisphere and is still the faith's principal temple in North America. Moody Bible Institute, founded in 1886, became a central institution of American evangelicalism and of the fundamentalist movement that grew out of it. The centenary Parliament of 1993, held in the same city, issued the declaration Towards a Global Ethic drafted by the theologian Hans Kung.

Connections

Associated With

This source names Chicago directly: "Tooth, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2021, is a scholarly study of Western accounts and receptions of the Sri Lankan Buddha's Tooth relic held at the Temple of the Sacred Tooth..."

Source The Buddha's Tooth: Western Tales of a Sri Lankan RelicJohn S. Strong

This source names Chicago directly: "The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral is the Anglican Communion's own foundational statement of the essentials required for church unity, adopted as Resolution 11 of the 1888 Lambeth Conference from..."

Source The Chicago-Lambeth QuadrilateralThe Lambeth Conferencethe holders' own account

This source names Chicago directly: "study, published by the University of Chicago Press, arguing that sharply bounded religious identity within the Sikh tradition, as distinct from earlier more fluid and shared devotional practice..."

Source The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh TraditionHarjot Oberoi

This source names Chicago directly: "and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1989, presents the influential Paris school reading of ancient Greek animal sacrifice as fundamentally a system of cooking and meat distribution..."

Source The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the GreeksMarcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (eds.)

This source names Chicago directly: "1988 study from the University of Chicago Press, is a major scholarly account of the South Indian Draupadi cult and its mythology."

Source The Cult of Draupadi, Volume 1: Mythologies from Gingee to KuruksetraAlf Hiltebeitel

This source names Chicago directly: "published by the University of Chicago Press in 1984."

Source The Cult of the Goddess Pattini (Obeyesekere)Gananath Obeyesekere

This source names Chicago directly: "The Cult of the Saints, University of Chicago Press, 1981, is a scholarly study."

Source The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin ChristianityPeter Brown

This source names Chicago directly: "in 1922 and premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock on 29 October 1920."

Source The Garden of Fand, IMSLP and Repertoire Explorer Publication Records (Arnold Bax)

This source names Chicago directly: "the score's premiere details (Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock, 29 October 1920) and the composer's own extensive prefatory programme note."

Source The Garden of Fand, IMSLP and Repertoire Explorer Publication Records (Arnold Bax)

This source names Chicago directly: "the Free Methodist Publishing House in Chicago, reprinted in 1896, and used as the standard songbook of Free Methodist worship through the end of the nineteenth century."

Source The Hymn Book of the Free Methodist Church (Wesleyan Holiness Digital Library, Seattle Pacific University)Free Methodist Church; W. T. Hogue; B. T. Roberts

This source names Chicago directly: "published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005, is a widely cited work of religious studies scholarship arguing that the standard modern list of world religions, the category itself, is a..."

Source The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of PluralismTomoko Masuzawa

This source names Chicago directly: "creation chant, and this University of Chicago Press book is Martha Warren Beckwith's scholarly translation and study of it, drawing on multiple textual sources including Queen Liliuokalani's own..."

Source The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation ChantMartha Warren Beckwith

This source names Chicago directly: "Michigan, New York and Ohio met in Chicago and signed a constitution founding the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio and Other States, the body that later took the name the Lutheran..."

Source About The LCMS (LCMS.org)

This source names Chicago directly: "Parva, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1978 as part of van Buitenen's multi-volume translation project, is a scholarly primary text translation of the epic's account of the Pandavas'..."

Source The Mahabharata (Book 4, Virata Parva)trans. J. A. B. van Buitenen

This source names Chicago directly: "a Social Creed drafted chiefly by the Chicago pastor Harry F."

Source The 1908 Social Creed of the Methodist Episcopal Church (General Board of Church and Society)

This source names Chicago directly: "account, covers its 1887 founding in Chicago and the 1911 Edward E."

Source The Newberry Library (institutional record)the holders' own account

This source names Chicago directly: "modern Britain, and this University of Chicago Press book is her academic study of British occultism, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its associated figures, read as a genuine expression..."

Source The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the ModernAlex Owen

This source names Chicago directly: "of the Hidden Moon, University of Chicago Press, 1966, is a scholarly study."

Source The Place of the Hidden Moon: Erotic Mysticism in the Vaisnava-Sahajiya Cult of BengalEdward C. Dimock Jr.

This source names Chicago directly: "Church, Missouri Synod, organized in Chicago in 1847, also recorded here, the Prussian crown dissolved Lutheranism's separate legal identity within its own territory."

Source Christopher Clark, Confessional Policy and the Limits of State Action (The Historical Journal)Christopher Clark

This source names Chicago directly: "pastor of Southside Alliance Church in Chicago, an elected CMA vice president, and editor of the denomination's own Alliance Weekly."

Source A. W. Tozer (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Chicago directly: "published by the University of Chicago Press, treating it as both a real laboratory practice and a system of allegory, correcting older popular accounts that treated it as either purely mystical or..."

Source The Secrets of AlchemyLawrence M. Principe

This source names Chicago directly: "Imam, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1984, is a major work of scholarship."

Source The Shadow of God and the Hidden ImamSaid Amir Arjomand

This source names Chicago directly: "is a historian, and this University of Chicago Press book is the standing scholarly history of the legal repression of Haitian popular ritual, tracing colonial-era law through the postcolonial penal..."

Source The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in HaitiKate Ramsey

This source names Chicago directly: "1989 study from the University of Chicago Press, is a scholarly translation and study of a Srivaisnava commentary by two established scholars of South Asian religion with direct command of the Tamil..."

Source The Tamil Veda: Pillan's Interpretation of the TiruvaymoliJohn Carman and Vasudha Narayanan

This source names Chicago directly: "Verellen edited this University of Chicago Press reference work, a three volume scholarly companion describing and dating every text contained in the Zhengtong Daozang, the 1445 Ming dynasty Taoist..."

Source The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the DaozangKristofer Schipper and Franciscus Verellen (eds.)

This source names Chicago directly: "Its origin traces to Chicago around 1911, when the physician William S."

Source The Urantia Book (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Chicago directly: "civilization, and this University of Chicago Press volume is the first of his landmark three-volume history, published posthumously, covering the formative and classical periods of Islamic..."

Source The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of IslamMarshall G. S. Hodgson

This source names Chicago directly: "Religions, The East, West Encounter, Chicago 1893, published by Indiana University Press in 1995, is a scholarly study of the landmark 1893 gathering in Chicago that brought representatives of the..."

Source The World's Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1893Richard Hughes Seager

This source names Chicago directly: "Advanced Thought Publishing Company in Chicago, is the work that put the phrase Law of Attraction into circulation in its modern New Thought sense."

Source Thought Vibration, or the Law of Attraction in the Thought WorldWilliam Walker Atkinson

This source names Chicago directly: "Church, Missouri Synod organized in Chicago in 1847, and twenty nine years before the Lutheran World Federation formed in Lund, Sweden in 1947, both already recorded here, American Lutheranism's..."

Source United Lutheran Church in America Records (Pacific Lutheran University Archives)

This source names Chicago directly: "Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago in 1993, is the primary document itself, signed by more than two hundred religious and spiritual leaders representing over forty traditions, stating..."

Source Towards a Global Ethic: An Initial DeclarationDrafted principally by Hans Kung, endorsed by the Parliament of the World's Religions Assembly of religious and spiritual leaders

This source names Chicago directly: "performance, and this University of Chicago Press book is his scholarly study of devadasis, temple dancers of South India, and how their history is remembered and contested in modern India."

Source Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South IndiaDavesh Soneji

Vivekananda addressed the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893.

This source names Chicago directly: "Practicing in Chicago with his physician wife Lena Kellogg Sadler, he investigated a neighbor exhibiting unusual sleep talk from around 1911, and by the 1920s the case had grown into extensive..."

Source William S. Sadler (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Chicago directly: "in 1910, his psychiatric practice in Chicago, and his role in the origin and publication of The Urantia Book."

Source William S. Sadler (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Chicago directly: "and published by the University of Chicago Press."

Source With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South IndiaGayatri Reddy

This source names Chicago directly: "Held today by the Art Institute of Chicago."

Source Zhuangzi, from the series Shunshoku ressenkyo, Art Institute of Chicago

Showing 51 to 87 of 87 in Associated With, page 2 of 2.

Contained In

Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
3. The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
John Bowker (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1997View the Source
The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition
Oxford University Press, Oxford University Pressdemonym / adjectival formView the Source
The World's Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1893
Richard Hughes Seager, Indiana University Press, 1995
Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952
Wallace D. Best, Princeton University Press, 2005
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