Baylor and Notre Dame are natural rivals on the basketball court who meet Tuesday in the NCAA Women’s National Championship Game. And it’s a rivalry with an intriguing religious subtext: Baylor is the world’s largest Baptist university; Notre Dame is the world’s best-known Catholic institution of higher education.
Born and raised Catholic in New England, I had never met a Southern Baptist until I graduated high school. Working for the Catholic church in rural Oklahoma, I was welcomed by many Southern Baptist families who I knew through my work at the local middle school. In attending Baptist services, I was struck by a welcoming and friendly atmosphere that I had rarely experience at a Catholic Mass. But I was also struck by the diverse approaches to worship: the devotional aesthetics of Baptist celebrations were so different from a Catholic Mass. These differences did not have to do with the obvious cultural differences between Massachusetts and Oklahoma, but stemmed from even deeper differences about how to define and characterize the Christian tradition itself.
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