www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology A Suggestion: Documenting Holy Week

I want to suggest that as many of us as possible collect Parish Bulletins from as many Eastern Christian Parishes as possible documenting the services that are planned for Great and Holy Week.

We will then need a way of collating the data. If all else fails, I am willing to do so the "old fashioned" way. but the techno-philes among us may be able to fashion a more elegant solution.

Such a compilation would be interesting in itself, but might also provide a base-line for documenting change over time or for collecting more detailed data in the future about exactly how the various services are performed.

In any case, the first step is to collect bulletins [or any other source that documents what is planned by the parish]. We have a 2-4 week window in which such sources should be available. If we all make an effort to find out as much as we can, it could be an exciting collaboration.

Last year I worked with the Administrator to try to develop a Form for a survey of Holy Week services using Microsoft Front Page, but we could not get the Microsoft Extensions to work properly. If anyone on the Forum has experience with that program it should not take too much additional work to provide a very useable research tool.

I smell a statistician in the room

Alas, there is no doubt that I smell, but I choose a different medium for my falsehoods, so I am hoping you know of another statistician who can step forward and lend credibility to our data!

There has been one offer of technical assistance, but it will be for naught if folks don't collect data over the next two weeks, so please try to do so!

How about starting a frapper map solely for parish listings? Is that possible?

What we need is to indicate the jurisdiction, all the known Holy Week services and the normal schedule in "ordinary" time. It's rough but it could work in a pinch, time is short.

Of course this would be a self selected group but it could give us a 'snapshot'. If something like this is done every year there might be some valuable insight discerned from the info.

+T+
Michael

I'm in - let's do it!

I'm pretty certain I started a parish map frappr over on townhall. So check it out, there should be two (I believe there was when I started the other map, that was a while back and this has been a crazy last few months).
The first map is the original
The second map is for parishes