Chapel

A hospital is commonly considered a sanctuary of science, where advances in technology and medicine combine to alleviate human suffering. But all that is incomplete, says Dr. Dale Matthews, who teaches at Georgetown University Medical School, without the science of the soul. Matthews, a Washington internist who is a nationally recognized authority on the relationship between faith and healing, was in Baltimore yesterday to help dedicate a new ecumenical chapel at Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson.

MEMORIAL DAY weekend will be an extraordinary time for Dennis Kast Jr., 14, and his family. At 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Dennis will become an Eagle Scout. The Court of Honor ceremony will be held in the Big G auditorium at Springfield Hospital Center in Sykesville. Betty Jean Maus, Springfield's director of volunteer services, was happy to have the event at the center because of work undertaken there by Dennis as part of his Eagle Scout requirements. To demonstrate his leadership ability, Dennis was project manager for the renovation of the nondenominational chapel on the Springfield grounds.

Ralph Ellison, the writer, died at 80 last weekend.I remember Ralph Ellison, the teacher. He taught an American literature course at Bard College, in Annandale-on-the-Hudson, New York, in 1958.That year, several times a week, he strolled the path from the nearby town of Tivoli to the campus where he held his class. The class met in the chapel of a country church at the edge of the school grounds. Ralph Ellison would magically appear from out of the woods that formed a barrier on the hillside and separated the old church from the banks of the Hudson River down below.

Out of a disastrous fire in 1990, the St. Paul's School community has forged a new bond of unity: a magnificent neo-Georgian and medieval-style chapel on the Brooklandville campus, to be consecrated in an elaborate ceremony tonight."

News of the armistice that ended World War I arrived in the village of Odenton with train whistles and pealing church bells. When Mrs. Oscar MacNemar heard it, she grabbed her 4-year-old son Tom and ran with him down Odenton Road, straight to the front pew at the new Epiphany Chapel and Church House. Together they offered a prayer of thanksgiving. Tom's father, a village doctor then serving at the front in France, would soon be coming home. Yesterday, on a sun-washed afternoon 86 years later, little Tom's widow, Josephine MacNemar, was on hand for the rededication and blessing of the same chapel, just emerging from a three-year, $1.2 million restoration.

Joshua Fischer will have graduated from the Naval Academy by the time the Commodore Uriah P. Levy Center and Jewish Chapel is due to open in spring 2005. But Fischer, 21, president of the Jewish Midshipmen's Club, has big plans for the $12.8 million center -- the academy's first Jewish house of worship. "One day, when I find a woman who wants to marry me -- and be stuck with me for the rest of my life -- hopefully I'll come back and get married there," said Fischer, of Phoenix, Ariz. The academy broke ground on the project yesterday.

The dun-colored World War I shovel and helmet on a table at Epiphany Episcopal Church yesterday made sharp contrast with the glowing ruby and gold of the stained-glass windows.But the two fit together: The chapel has offered light and hope to those in trying times since it was built to serve the military 75 years ago, said the Rev. Phoebe Coe, speaking at the church's Armistice Day celebration.The Odenton chapel's mission remains to serve those engulfed in modern-day wars of the body and soul, Ms. Coe said.

Kenneth C. Hamrick, a former Methodist minister who restored a 150-year-old chapel near Thurmont, died of cancer Wednesday at his home in Smithsburg. He was 65. Born and educated in Washington, Mr. Hamrick graduated from American University in 1960 and Wesley Theological Seminary four years later. He served in the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church for 32 years, 27 of them at Thurmont United Methodist. He left the ministry in 1995. At the time of his death, he was working as a sales representative for a lighting company.

When the Rev. Robert S. Loiselle Sr. was called out of retirement in Florida in 2001 to lead St. Paul's Anglican Church, its future was uncertain. The Crownsville church's finances sat squarely in the red, and its aging congregation numbered 67. "We weren't getting many young couples, and we needed to try something new," said Loiselle, who served the church in the 1990s as a rector, organist and choir director. Six years later, the membership is up to 183, and the church ended the year with $50,000 in the bank, according to financial records published in the bulletin.

When the Veterans Affairs Medical Center at Perry Point flipped the switch on the new closed-circuit cameras in the multidenominational chapel, many of the volunteers who helped raise the $9,317 for the system thought the center's bedridden patients would be able to watch religious services in their rooms. That was in November 2000. But most of the patients on the campus still can't see what's going on in the chapel without walking down there on their own. The cable system at the 364-acre center is too old to carry the signal from the chapel to Perry Point's origination station.