ST DUNSTAN-IN-THE-EAST, HISTORICAL SITE IN LONDON

Today, The Grandma has visited one of the most beautiful places in London, St Dunstan-in-the-East, a parish church, where you can find enough peace to disconnect and relax. Meanwhile, the family has been studying some English grammar with the Possessive Adjectives and Can/Can't.

 

More information: Can/Can't

 

More information: Possessive Adjectives

 

Enjoy Radio Garden

St Dunstan-in-the-East was a Church of England parish church on St Dunstan's Hill, halfway between London Bridge and the Tower of London in the City of London. The church was largely destroyed in the Second World War and the ruins are now a public garden.

The church was originally built in about 1100. A new south aisle was added in 1391 and the church was repaired in 1631 at a cost of more than £2,400. It was severely damaged in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Rather than being completely rebuilt, the damaged church was patched up between 1668 and 1671. A steeple was added in 1695-1701 to the designs of Sir Christopher Wren. 

It was built in a gothic style sympathetic to main body of the church, though with heavy string courses of a kind not used in the Middle Ages. It has a needle spire carried on four flying buttresses in the manner of that of St Nicholas in Newcastle. The restored church had wooden carvings by Grinling Gibbons and an organ by Father Smith, which was transferred to the abbey at St Albans in 1818.

In 1817, it was found that the weight of the nave roof had thrust the walls seven inches out of the perpendicular. It was decided to rebuild the church from the level of the arches, but the state of the structure proved so bad that the whole building was taken down. It was rebuilt to a design in the perpendicular style by David Laing (then architect to the Board of Customs) with assistance from William Tite. The foundation stone was laid in November 1817 and the church re-opened for worship in January 1821. Built of Portland stone, with a plaster lierne nave vault, it was 115 feet long and 65 feet wide and could accommodate between six and seven hundred people. The cost of the work was £36,000. Wren's tower was retained in the new building.

The church was severely damaged in the Blitz of 1941. Wren's tower and steeple survived the bombs' impact. Of the rest of the church only the north and south walls remained. In the re-organisation of the Anglican Church in London following the War it was decided not to rebuild St Dunstan's, and in 1967 the City of London Corporation decided to turn the ruins of the church into a public garden, which opened in 1971. A lawn and trees were planted in the ruins, with a low fountain in the middle of the nave. The tower now houses the All Hallows House Foundation.

The parish is now combined with the Benefice of All Hallows by the Tower and occasional open-air services are held in the church, such as on Palm Sunday prior to a procession to All Hallows by the Tower along St Dunstan's Hill and Great Tower Street. The ruin was designated a Grade I listed building on 4 January 1950.

More information: City of London

Anglicanism is a Western Christian tradition which developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the context of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. It is one of the largest branches of Christianity, with around 110 million adherents worldwide as of 2001.

Adherents of Anglicanism are called Anglicans; they are also called Episcopalians in some countries. The majority of Anglicans are members of national or regional ecclesiastical provinces of the international Anglican Communion, which forms the third-largest Christian communion in the world, after the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. These provinces are in full communion with the See of Canterbury and thus with the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom the communion refers to as its primus inter pares (Latin, 'first among equals'). The archbishop calls the decennial Lambeth Conference, chairs the meeting of primates, and is the president of the Anglican Consultative Council.

Anglicans base their Christian faith on the Bible, traditions of the apostolic church, apostolic succession (historic episcopate), and the writings of the Church Fathers, as well as historically, the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion and The Books of Homilies.

After the American Revolution, Anglican congregations in the United States and British North America (which would later form the basis for the modern country of Canada) were each reconstituted into autonomous churches with their own bishops and self-governing structures; these were known as the American Episcopal Church and the Church of England in the Dominion of Canada. Through the expansion of the British Empire and the activity of Christian missions, this model was adopted as the model for many newly formed churches, especially in Africa, Australasia, and the Asia-Pacific.

In the 19th century, the term Anglicanism was coined to describe the common religious tradition of these churches and also that of the Scottish Episcopal Church, which, though originating earlier within the Church of Scotland, had come to be recognised as sharing this common identity.

More information: History

That Britain today is a liberal society is largely
because of the philosophy and outlook of the Anglican Church,
which did so much to shape our core values
in the past few centuries.

Robert Winston

DIVINATION & CARTOMANCY, YOU WILL BE PROSPEROUS

Today, The Fosters & The Grandma has been reading about the tarot, the pack of playing cards sometimes relationed with divination, card reading and cartomancy. They have been predicting the future, and the best way to do it is to invent it.

 

Before, they have studied some English grammar with the Future Simple and Possessive Adjectives.

 

Finally, they have read Oscar Wilde's The Ghost of Canterville.

 

More information: Future Simple

 

More information: Possessive Adjectives

The tarot (first known as trionfi and later as tarocchi or tarocks) is a pack of playing cards, used from at least the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play card games such as Tarocchini.

From their Italian roots, tarot playing cards spread to most of Europe evolving into a family of games that includes German Grosstarok and more recent games such as French Tarot and Austrian Königrufen which are still played today.

In the late 18th century, French occultists began to make elaborate, but unsubstantiated, claims about their history and meaning, leading to the emergence of custom decks for use in divination via tarot card reading and cartomancy.

Thus there are two distinct types of tarot pack: those used for playing games and those used for divination. However, some older patterns, such as the Tarot de Marseille, originally intended for playing card games, have also been used for cartomancy.

Like the common playing cards, tarot has different suits which vary by region: French suits are used in western, central and eastern Europe, Latin suits in southern Europe.

More information: Learn Religions

Cartomantic packs have their own symbols derived from the Latin suits. Each suit has 14 cards: ten pip cards numbering from one (or Ace) to ten, and four face cards (King, Queen, Knight, and Jack/Knave/Page). In addition, the tarot has a separate 21-card trump suit and a single card known as the Fool. Depending on the game, the Fool may act as the top trump or may be played to avoid following suit. These tarot cards are still used throughout much of Europe to play conventional card games without occult associations.

Among English-speaking countries where these games are not widely played, only specially designed cartomantic tarot cards are readily available and they are used primarily for novelty and divinatory purposes.

The early French occultists claimed that tarot cards had esoteric links to ancient Egypt, the Kabbalah, Indic Tantra, or the I Ching and these claims have been frequently repeated by authors on card divination ever since.

In the occult tradition, tarot cards are referred to as arcana; with the Fool and 21 trumps being termed the Major Arcana and the suit cards the Minor Arcana. However, these terms are not used by players of tarot card games.

Tarot cards, then known as tarocchi, first appeared in Ferrara and Milan in northern Italy, with a Fool and 21 trumps (then called trionfi) being added to the standard Italian pack of four suits: batons, coins, cups and swords.

Scholarship has established that the early European cards were probably based on the Egyptian Mamluk deck which followed the invention of paper from Asia into Western Europe and was invented in or before the 14th century.

By the late 1300's Europeans were producing their own cards, the earliest patterns being based on the Mamluk deck but with variations to the suit symbols and court cards.

More information: Collectors Weekly

 Once upon a time,
tarot reading was about discovering 

what your future held.
These days tarot helps you craft 

exactly the future you desire.

Sasha Graham

S. JOHN THE DIVINE CATHEDRAL, MORNING SIDE HEIGHTS

Today, June 24, is the festivity of Saint John, a great day for The Grandma, and to commemorate it, she has visited the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights, Manhattan.

Meanwhile, The Newtons have continued preparing their Cambridge Exam. They have studied the Possessive Adjectives.

More information: Possessive Adjectives

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, sometimes referred to as St. John's and also nicknamed St. John the Unfinished, is the cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of New York.

It is at 1047 Amsterdam Avenue in the Morningside Heights neighbourhood of Manhattan in New York City, between West 110th Street (also known as Cathedral Parkway) and West 113th Street.

The cathedral is an unfinished building, with only two-thirds of the proposed building completed, due to several major stylistic changes and work interruptions. The original design, in the Byzantine Revival and Romanesque Revival styles, began construction in 1892.

After the opening of the crossing in 1909, the overall plan was changed to a Gothic Revival design. The completion of the nave was delayed until 1941 due to various funding shortfalls, and little progress has occurred since then, except for an addition to the tower at the nave's southwest corner.

After a large fire damaged part of the cathedral in 2001, it was renovated and rededicated in 2008. The towers above the western facade, as well as the southern transept and a proposed steeple above the crossing, have not been completed.

Despite being incomplete, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine is the world's sixth-largest church by area and either the largest or second-largest Anglican cathedral. The floor area of St. John's is 11,200 m2, spanning a length of 183 m, while the roof height of the nave is 54 m. Since the cathedral's interior is so large, it has been used for hundreds of events and art exhibitions. In addition, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine has been involved in various advocacy initiatives throughout its history.

More information: The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine

The cathedral close includes numerous buildings: the Leake & Watts Orphan Asylum Building, the cathedral proper, the St. Faith's House, the Choir School, the Deanery, and the Bishop's House.

The buildings are designed in several different styles and were built over prolonged periods of construction, with the Leake & Watts Orphan Asylum predating the cathedral itself. The cathedral close was collectively designated an official city landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2017.

The neighbourhood of Morningside Heights was thinly settled in the 17th century by the Dutch, then by the British.

It remained rural through the mid-19th century, with two exceptions. The first was the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, no longer extant, which opened on the site of the Columbia University campus near 116th Street in 1821.

The other was Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum, bounded by 110th Street to the south and 113th Street to the north, which later became the current cathedral site. The Leake and Watts asylum was incorporated in 1831 under act of the New York State Legislature, and three years later, 10 ha land at the corner of Bloomingdale Road (now Broadway) and 110th Street was purchased from the Bloomingdale Asylum.

The initial plans for the asylum were drawn up by Ithiel Town, but were revised several times to keep the costs within the asylum's budget. The cornerstone of the asylum was laid in 1838, and it was completed in 1843.

More information: Masonry Magazine

None of the dead come back. But some stay.

St. John the Divine