Often times, communities are built around religious institutions. These kinds of neighborhoods were prevalent in the past, and still do exist in some areas. I believe that an interesting idea for the final website would be to explore the influence of religion in communities, along with observation of different religious institutions (their prayer process and customs).
This would be similar to the neighborhood exploration project, in that students would visit different religious institutions, such as churches and synagogues, and attend a prayer service (being cognizant of religious sensitivity and other requirements of attending the service). Students can also explore the immediate surrounding neighborhoods in order to gain a sense of how the religious institution affects the people close to it. There could be stores that belong to the same culture/ group of people that attend the religious institution, or people of that faith that choose to live in close proximity to the institution because of their beliefs.
Though the influence of religion on modern society is decreasing, I believe it would be interesting to analyze the varying degrees to which it influences certain cultures. For example, if one religious institution attracts a larger congregation than one of the same religion in another area, it would be interesting to see why this was happening. It could be due to how many people of the same faith reside in the area, or how many services the institution provides to the congregants.
Even though this will be more of an observation and analysis based website, I believe that if the assignments are distributed among people that are not necessarily familiar with their religious assignment, the perspectives they provide will be fresh and unbiased.
The main reason I have suggested this project is because communities being built around religious institutions is something I have seen a lot of growing up. When I lived in Richmond Hill, my family and I used to attend the local Sikh temple twice a week. After attending the prayer services, we all would go buy groceries from a Sikh man who owned a shop just around the corner, and I would play “MLB Showdown” with his son. In this way, the Sikh temple had a community built around it. I believe that just like this, many other religious institutions have communities surrounding them specifically due to their location.
