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Holy Trinity Student Parish a Great Place to Be

The Holy Trinity Student Parish is located on Forest road near the Eastern Michigan University campus. After much observation, I discovered that the community is a very unique place. Entering the building, I discovered it is a very pleasant place to be. To learn more about the community and gain an insider's view I interviewed John Hoffman, the night greeter at the parish. The interview took place at the parish on October 19, 2011. During the interview I asked question about the community and more personal questions about how he became a member.

The interview got personal during the first question of the interview when the question led to the topic that he was taken in by a priest in Columbia when he was a young boy which is part of the reason he likes how the church provides things like worldwide aid, helps charities for poverty, and how in a spiritual sense the church will take in people in with problems like drug addictions out of love. John had only been a member of that parish for a short amount of time after applying for a job there. Previously, he had been a member of the St. Johns.

When i asked him "What do you like least about your job?"

He replied  "In general that people do not know about its environment. A lot of the time people don’t come in on the week days, so there is no one to greet."

However, John had many more positive things to say about his community. When asked what made the Holy Trinity Student Parish different from other communities he responded by saying

"As opposed to other religious communities it is a student parish and therefore oriented towards the student body. There are areas just to hang out and food for students to eat. "Another astounding thing he had to say about his community was that his community welcomes everyone. He later went on to describe how that even his Atheist friends or friends of other religions were even welcome to the Agape lunches after mass. According to John "in some ways we exhibit the true spirit of Christ." How welcoming the community helps explain the diversity in the community members for such a little parish.

Later in the interview, John went on to say that their community does not have too many issues and that most of them are organizational. Their problems are solved by confronting one another and discussing went wrong. Overall there are two leaders of the community Father Philip and Father Joseph.

To find out how John felt personally about his community I asked him if he considered his community to be more of a family or a community.

He responded by saying “I consider it to be more of a community but in a sense a family. If I ever need help or someone to talk to I would come here, and I know that help would be provided."

I found that I had been a witness to many positive things that John has said. The first time I entered the building I was welcomed despite not being Catholic. Overall, the Holy Trinity Student Parish is a uniquely welcoming place and is worth checking out.

      The article I wrote is about the Holy Trinity Student Parish. The article gives background information on the community like where it is located. After the background information I incorporated parts of my interview with John to help give a better description of the community.

The interview highlights many positive aspects of the community like how welcoming it is and also gives a true sense of what is like to be a member.

      I incorporated the conventions of the article genre to suit my own purposes by giving the

background information about my community and the who, what, when, where, and why of the Holy Trinity Student Parish. By incorporating my interview, there was more of a sense of what it is like to be a member. I did not tweak this particular genre because it worked very well to share the information I wanted it to.

     The target audience was similar to that of my inspiration piece. Like my inspiration piece my article was also targeted towards a younger audience because it is posted on a blog but also has a more general target audience because the article discusses how the community is welcoming. Although the main target of this article is the younger generation. It may also target other people in the area that are looking for a place to worship. 

      The information that was included in this piece was from my field notes and from my interview. I incorporated some of my field notes by using the information that was contained in them to help provide background information about the community in the article . The interview I used was the one with John. I incorporated the interview by turning the article into an interview article. I chose to put these things into my piece because both were easy to incorporate into an article and the field notes and the interview were more interesting and helped to provide a more personal idea of what the community is like.

      The information I did not include in the article was my research and a different interview I did with Sister Carmen. I chose not to include them because they were not as interesting to write about in an article and did not help provide a glimpse into the Holy Trinity Student Parish community in particular. Both the other interview and my research were more generally about Catholicism.