Nashville copts

Mark in the first century and was home to some of the early fathers of the church, including St. Alexander, St. Cyril and St. In the fifth century, the church in Alexandria split with Rome, but their union was later restored. Currently, Father Youssef Boushara, a Coptic Catholic priest in Brooklyn, travels to Nashville once every two or three months to celebrate Mass for the local community. Finding a priest who could live in Nashville would help nurture the faith of the Coptic Catholic immigrants here, Cardinal Naguib said.

A problem facing immigrant communities everywhere, Cardinal Naguib said, is that as the succeeding generations assimilate into their new culture, they lose a connection to the faith of their homeland. He talked about restrictions that Egyptian society and the government put on Christians and their churches, and noted Egyptians are facing several important elections.

In general we would say freedom and equality and basing the government on citizenship and not just religion. His concerns about his homeland are on the minds of Egyptian Catholics elsewhere in the United States.

In the Diocese of La Crosse, Wis. An Egyptian native, Keuntjes had family living in Cairo at the time of the upheaval — her mother and brother, Christians, and her father, who is Muslim. Baptized and raised in the Greek and Coptic Orthodox tradition, her family converted to Catholicism when Keuntjes was a youth.

Both women remain anxious about the situation in their homeland, but they are encouraged by the same faith in Christ and family support that has kept Egyptian Christians buoyant amid a seemingly endless sea of Muslim troubles.

In those moments, I felt that you could kill me, but I will never deny Christ. It was a faith she received from her mother, who spoke to The Catholic Times, the La Crosse diocesan newspaper, about the prospects of a peaceful future for Egypt. She spoke in French, with her daughter serving as translator. But finding strength in the daily recital of the rosary and Mass, Meleik knows that no government can conquer the kingdom of God.

If you live in the United States, click below to continue. This payment form requires your browser to have JavaScript enabled. Please activate JavaScript and reload this page. Check enable-javascript. We are sorry. Rather, I wish to argue that this population shift—of becoming a solid majority [1] —reveals new grounds of examining Coptic-Muslim relations outside of a context of persecution.

The population shift is visual: Coptic stores, under the banner of a saint, dot Murfreesboro Road, a road that leads from downtown Nashville to downtown Murfreesboro, two large Tennessee cities. The Copts mostly live in the space between those cities, as both are heavily gentrified.

Such stores have kept larger companies like Walmart and Kroger to monopolize immigrant neighborhoods, and they are supported by more than Copts. The Coptic-owned stores sell halal meat, advertise Ramadan specials, and Eastern European chocolates, and they sell fresh produce, often from local farmers.

Copts do not only own and manage grocery stores, but also immigration firms, entertainment businesses, salons and barber shops, hookah bars and liquor stores, gas stations, clinics for the underprivileged, and restaurants—from pizza to gyros. Arabic can be seen spiraled across Murfreesboro alongside visual icons indicating a store or clinic. The visual representation and interactive connections of these stores as non-exclusively Coptic and inclusive spaces highlight a working class, immigrant community that is thriving with little government incentive or support, with a diverse customer-base.

This kind of research in Nashville, of Coptic Orthodox communities outside of church space and religious connections, has profound effects. First, it destabilizes stereotypes of immigrant communities as isolated and non-assimilatory. Nashville provides an example of a community that is assimilating—just not into dominant ing , mainstream culture.

Instead of English, storeowners learn English, for insistence, to cooperate with farming agencies. Salon owners provide secure sections of their store for Muslim clients who are veiled. Ethiopian coffee shops are better sites for connection than a Starbucks for some Copts.

Immigrants, like anyone, do not exist on islands. Secondly, this kind of localized ethnography destabilizes other stereotypes, particularly ones centered on Copts as persecuted and victims. Instead, zooming in on the local reveals complicated individuals. Instead, Copts are entrepreneurs, farmers, factory workers. Thirdly, localized ethnography brings voices to the foreground that imagine.