The Sikh temple on Euless Boulevard comes to life every Sunday morning. Men wearing turbans and women in colorful dress remove their shoes and wash their hands before entering the temple, which is in a former bank building. Once inside, they sit cross-legged on opposite sides of the main hall, singing hymns and praying in Panjabi, the native language of many of the members, who come from northwestern India and eastern Pakistan. After the service, plates are handed out for a communal vegetarian lunch. The temple is also open for daily prayer services, with members driving from Arlington, Fort Worth and Dallas to participate.
Rajvir Singh of Arlington said it's important for his people to have a Sikh temple nearby. About 300 people regularly attend Sunday services at the temple, called Gurdwara Sikh Sangat.
"There is a plus if you have your community with you. You share the same culture. You share the same beliefs," said Singh, a biological chemistry student at the University of Texas at
Arlington. "It's just the same as why anybody would want to get together with their culture."
The Sikhs represent a growing change in the makeup of religious groups in the suburbs, especially Northeast Tarrant County, where Baptists, Methodists and Catholics are now joined by Buddhists, Hindus, Romanian Orthodox and Baha'i.
As people move into North Texas -- seeking jobs and a better education for their children -- it's only natural for them to open houses of worship and cultural centers to meet their spiritual needs. Changes to the religious landscape are particularly noticeable in Euless and Colleyville.
"What's driving this is you're getting folks who aren't from Texas who are capitalizing on the opportunity, and of course, we bring our faith with us," said Jason E. Shelton, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at UT Arlington. "This isn't anything different than what we saw in the 1880s. This is the same story."
Euless has a Coptic Christian church on Euless Main Street, and nearby is a Greek Orthodox congregation that is building a new church featuring Byzantine architecture.
Plans are also under way to build a Buddhist and Hindu cultural and spiritual center on a 4-acre tract along Euless Boulevard to serve the Nepali community. About 9,000 of the 54,700 residents of Euless were born outside the United States, and another 1,672 were born in a U.S. territory or born abroad to American parents. Of those, 36 percent were from Latin America, 32 percent from Asia and 18 percent from Africa. according to the 2009 American Community Survey.
Students in the Hurst-Euless-Bedford (HEB) schools speak 72 languages at home, including Arabic,
Vietnamese and Urdu, the district's annual survey showed.
Neighboring Colleyville is a bit of an anomaly. There's a Romanian Orthodox Church, a mosque, a Catholic church, a synagogue, a Baha'i community, several protestant churches and more, all within the borders of this largely white, affluent city.
St. Mary's Romanian Orthodox Church launched 30 years ago in a small building that another Christian congregation used for services. It is unclear why the community settled there, but parish priest, The Reverend Gabriel Popa, speculates that the property was affordable for the group, mostly first-generation immigrants.
"Thirty years ago, it was a farm zone," he said.
In 2004, members bought a different piece of property and built a new church on Glade Road. The congregation has grown from 20 or 30 members to more than 300, although only a few live in Colleyville, with others driving as much as 50 miles to the church.
Colleyville is also the home of the Coptic Orthodox Diocese of the Southern United States, which hosts the offices of a bishop and serves 28 Coptic communities in 11 states. The Coptic Christian Church was established in Egypt, and many adherents are Egyptian immigrants, officials said. Locally, the Coptic Church launched in 1985 in Colleyville at St. Mary Coptic Orthodox Church. A handful of families had been renting spaces elsewhere and came together to buy 4 acres in Colleyville on John McCain Road. St. Mary Coptic opened a new 400-seat building at the same address in December.
"They wanted a place of their own," said The Reverend Samuel Bakhoum, the priest at St. Mary Coptic. "It's important to have a gathering space to socialize, for people to celebrate."
In 2004, another group from St. Mary found a church building for sale in Euless and branched off, creating St. Abanoub Coptic Orthodox Church. The St. Abanoub congregation has surpassed that of St. Mary Coptic, with about 300 families, many of whom moved to Texas to be near relatives who had already immigrated.
Several of the Colleyville faiths came together for an interfaith National Day of Prayer event marking the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The North East Tarrant Interreligious Association hosted similar National Day of Prayer events in 2009 and 2010.
"Everybody prayed from their own perspective," said Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, of Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville. "The goal was for everyone to be able to say 'amen' to everything."
, St. Thomas Aquinas concluded that he had not yet begun to understand God the Father.
and the 
.
#239 specifically states that "God is neither man nor woman: he is God". Yet, God is thought of as dominant, powerful, fatherly, masculine, passionate, whose ways are too high for his children to understand. God is traditionally referred to by the masculine pronoun he (often capitalized; He).
, one of the earliest printed Bibles carried a depiction of God the Father in 
. By the 15th century, the 
included depictions of God the Father in human form. The trend in depicting God the Father in Western art continued thereafter, although still prohibited by the Eastern Orthodox Churches.
, who were semi-ascetic, expected an apocalypse, and practiced rituals conferring strongly with baptism, although there is no direct evidence to substantiate this.
(book 18, chapter 5, 2) by Flavius Josephus (37–100):
often make use of this more specific definition for a pentagram enclosed in a circle.
), as the natural balance between fire, water, earth, wood, and metal. This theory states that the direction it is pointing has nothing to do with good or evil, but rather the upside-down facing circle is for banishing. The circle is again for the concept the power within is bound by, this time for the circle of life.
's index system of Sumerian hieroglyphs/pictograms it is shown with two points up. In the Babylonian context, the edges of the pentagram were probably orientations: forward, backward, left, right, and "above". These directions also had an astrological meaning, representing the five planets Jupiter, Mercury, Mars and Saturn, and Venus as the "Queen of Heaven" (Ishtar) above.
called the pentagram ὑγιεία Hygieia ("health"; also the Greek goddess of health, Hygieia), and saw in the pentagram a mathematical perfection (see Geometry section below).
and others perpetuated the popularity of the pentagram as a magic symbol, keeping the Pythagorean attributions of elements to the five points. By the mid-19th century a further distinction had developed amongst occultists regarding the pentagram's orientation. With a single point upwards it depicted spirit presiding over the four elements of matter, and was essentially "good". However, the influential writer 
called it evil whenever the symbol appeared the other way up.
).
" symbolizes the five wounds of Christ. The pentagram was believed to protect against witches and demons.
began using used both upright and inverted five-pointed stars in Temple architecture, dating back to the Nauvoo Illinois Temple, which was dedicated on April 30th, 1846. Other temples decorated with five-pointed stars in both orientations include the Salt Lake Temple, and the Logan Temple. These symbols derived from traditional Morning Star (Lucifer) pentagrams that are not used by Christian denominations.
. Its religious symbolism is commonly explained by reference to the neo-Pythagorean understanding that the five vertices of the pentagram represent the four elements with the addition of Spirit as the uppermost point. As a representation of the elements, the pentagram is involved in the Wiccan practice of summoning the elemental spirits of the four directions at the beginning of a ritual.
. Less esoteric LaVeyan Satanists use it as a sign of rebellion or religious identification, the three downward points symbolising rejection of the holy Trinity.
also made use of the pentagram and in his Thelemic system of magick: an adverse or inverted pentagram represents the descent of spirit into matter, according to the interpretation of Lon Milo DuQuette. Crowley contradicted his old comrades in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, who following Levi considered this orientation of the symbol evil and associated it with the triumph of matter over spirit.
(Chinese:五行/Wǔ Xíng). Unlike the Greek system of four elements being Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, the Chinese system involved Fire (火/huǒ), Earth (土/tǔ), Metal (金/jīn), Water (水/shuǐ), and Wood (木/mù). This five element system was normally depicted as a pentagram(Chinese:五星/Wǔ Xīng) ringed by a circle. The circle was used to describe the generative cycle where wood feeds fire, fire creates earth (ash), earth bears metal, metal carries water, and water nourishes wood. The pentagram describes the destructive or overcoming system where Wood parts Earth, Earth absorbs Water, Water quenches Fire, Fire melts Metal, Metal chops Wood, or the alternative destructive system: Wood absorbs Water, Water rusts Metal, Metal breaks up Earth, Earth smothers Fire, Fire burns Wood. This system informs 
(TCM) even today. As the Wu Xing is of great antiquity and the silk road had been open to Europe since before the Roman Empire it is quite likely that this medical system was imported to Europe as a misunderstood and exotic practice involving spirits (
).
and Morocco and in some coats of arms.
), the archetypal wise king of Jewish, Christian and Muslim lore, although the Star of David is a more common and more widely accepted symbol.
, has employed a point-down pentagram as its symbol, with the five isosceles triangles of the points colored red, blue, yellow, white and green. This is an older form of the order's emblem and it is now more commonly depicted with the central pentagon rotated 36° so that it is no longer strictly a pentagram.
; it is a diagram of the "overcoming cycle" of 
. As a predominantly non-Christian country, with a different set of associations attached to the symbol, there is no social stigma associated with it.
