Cultural Dynamic Research Paper

One of my first best friends was a girl named Stephanie who is two years my junior. She lives just outside my neighborhood, so we rode the same school bus in elementary and middle school. When she was in kindergarden and I was in second grade, she invited me to sit with her on the bus, and because I have always been a rule-follower, I was reluctant to move seats. Stephanie and I grew very close, and I cherish the aspects of myself I learned about during our friendship. She now attends a local charter school for STEM fields, so I do not see her often, but though I miss her, our friendship has run its course. We were playing on the swing set in my backyard the first time our differences occured to me. She had requested that I stop saying “oh my God” because she’s Catholic and not supposed to take the Lord’s name in vain. I agreed, though I didn’t really understand at the time what her faith meant the cultural dynamic between us. …show more content…
I stayed in the pews while the rest of her family received the body and blood of Christ. My knees hurt, and that’s all I took away from it, other than the fact that this was all so much fancier than my church.
Because my dad is not religious and my mom follows a pagan spiritualism, I have been raised in a Unitarian Universalist church. I have never been told what to believe, only given resources to discover it myself. And though I have the reassurance that my beliefs are wholly my own, it has left me in an impasse: what are my