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In Places of Worship Scarred by Bullets, Long Memories and Shared Pain - The New York Times

posted onNovember 8, 2017
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Article snippet: OAK CREEK, Wis. — The worshipers, hundreds of them, had gathered Sunday for the afternoon meal in the vast, bright dining hall at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin, just as they do every Sunday. But before long, the happy din of the congregants was interrupted by a grim bulletin from Texas. People pushed away their plates of cauliflower and rice as the horrific news chirped across their cellphones. A gunman in a house of God. Multiple fatalities. Multiple injuries. The Sikh temple was 1,300 miles and worlds away from the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex. But at the temple, where a mass shooting left six dead five years ago, it felt sickeningly familiar, as it had at congregations in South Carolina and Tennessee and New York, places on the grim list of religious congregations that have become victims of gun violence. As different as they are, they share both a tragic past and a continuing struggle to move beyond it. “Every time this happens, we feel the pain again,” said Harjinder Singh, a priest, as he sat in the quiet temple on Tuesday. “It is like when you have a bandage on your body, and it is ripped away.” In a nation awash in guns, houses of worship in recent years have been the setting for numerous fatal shootings, including an attack by a white supremacist in 2015 at a historically African-American church in Charleston, S.C., that left nine people dead. As the news of Sunday’s massacre sunk in, there was a queasy feeling of solidarity in these sa... Link to the full article to read more

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