Internet researchers and the general public will be able for the first time to view on-line a photographic "album" depicting the rich diversity of Rochester's small, urban Latino and African-American churches. Often labelled "storefront" churches, these small, generally poor congregations take over former shops, abandoned houses or other buildings converting them into what Anthropology Professor David Day says amount to "urban spiritual empowerment zones" Students in Day's "Human Religious Experience" class, tapping into a grant from Harvard's Religious Pluralism Project, have taken more than 280 new photos of almost 90 of these "folk" churches and accompanied them with written personal narratives of their experiences.
Overwhelmingly suburban and white, the students have traversed parts of the inner city most have never seen on their first foray into "urban ethnography". These materials are currently being loaded onto the MCC web site, in addition to the 278 pages of text and 500 photographs taken by anthropology students in previous semesters of Rochester's non-Judeo-Christian faith groups. "All in all," one student commented recently, "the experience has been eye-opening and a lot of fun." See: HYPERLINK "
https://www.monroecc.edu/go/pluralism"www.monroecc.edu/go/pluralism.