Postsecular cities: space, theory and practice, edited by Beaumont, Justin and Christopher Baker (original) (raw)
Related papers
Exploring the Postsecular: the religious, the political and the urban
Religion is back on academic and political agendas in a major way. ‘As I’ve said many times, I believe that change comes not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up, and few are closer to the people than our churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques’. Barack Obama spoke these words in the Summer of 2008, proposing a new partnership between the White House and grass-roots groups, ‘both faith-based and secular’, in keeping with a tradition of such initiatives since the days of the Clinton administration. Obama added that his initiative endangered in no way the constitutional separation of church and state. Somehow the religious re-emerges in the secular and the public. Even the political role of religion is appreciated by so-called secular intellectuals formerly rather critical of religion. These developments have led observers to speculate about a new ‘postsecular’ age, particularly among scholars of prominence such as Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor and José Casanova. Looking at where exactly religion re-emerges in the secular, it seems also intriguing that urban environments play a prominent role, contrary to views that cities are merely places of a secular disengagement from a variety of faiths. Arguably it is in ‘the urban’ that the shift from the secular to the postsecular in terms of public space, building use, governance and civil society is most intensely observed and experienced. Th e constellation of the religious, the political and the urban—as our subtitle has it—is by no means easy to describe and analyse, nor to theorize. In this volume we have chosen primarily for a theoretical perspective (while retaining an openness to empirical manifestations of the central conceptual ideas) to address contemporary relations between religion, politics and urban societies. Th e primary focus is on the relations between public religion, deprivatization of religion and theorizations of modernity and modernities, with the secondary and closely related focus on theorizing postsecular urbanism including the role of faith based organizations (FBOs) in cities.
Editorial Special Issue Public religion and urban space in Europe
Social and Cultural Geography, 2014
Conflicts related to demographic and cultural change in Europe regularly find their expression in struggles over the presence and visibility of religious buildings and groups. As this editorial argues, these conflicts can best be understood from a postsecular perspective that takes into account overlapping and diverging histories of state-formation and secularization. The papers collected for this special issue on public religion and urban space demonstrate that many of the difficulties that European societies face in accommodating religious diversity stem from historically formed relationships between national political identities and religious identities. In many European cases, secularization did not entail a fundamental separation between religion and politics but the formal establishment of one single national church or two competing ones, but territorially based national churches. One of the consequences of these types of establishments is that certain religious traditions are generally described and experienced as fitting with the nation and others are not. The contributors to this special issue show in detail that the struggles of contemporary religious movements in Europe to become present in the public domain are related to commonly accepted understandings of where and how religion should manifest itself in the urban environment, based on the public life of religious traditions that are considered part of the nation.
Transcending the particular in postsecular cities
Religion is back on academic and political agendas in a major way. In the words of Barack Obama ‘[t]he fact is, the challenges we face today – from saving our planet to ending poverty – are simply too big for government to solve alone. We need all hands on deck’ (Obama 2008). Critical enquiries on “postsecularism”, in general, and the more recent and hitherto largely underexplored “postsecular city” in particular, lie at the centrepiece of this conference. Their precise meanings for understanding and explaining pluralities and their interconnectivities in cities in late capitalist societies remain poorly understood. This paper makes an attempt to chart this theoretical terrain to conceptualize the changing relations between religion, politics and urban societies. Against the charges of Eurocentricity and indifference to multicultural diversity, my argument is two-fold. First, if we apply postsecularism to urban thinking we have a robust means for transcending the particularities of difference between diverse social identities in cities. Second, this transparticularity, if understood carefully and applied diligently, can be mobilized for a new politics of urban reconnectivity as counter to the most divisive and invidious effects of globalization. The fusion of these theoretical and political concerns with ongoing empirical enquiries into faith-based organizations (FBOs) in cities requires sensitive analysis, with this paper and the conference at large just the beginning.
Religion and Urbanity Online , 2020
If 'urban religion' can serve as a lens onto the historical entanglement of cities or even more loosely 'urban settlements', it is the spatial character of religion that needs to be understood and theoretically modelled. In the history of research, 'sacred places' have played a prominent role as loci of epiphanic character, above all in phenomenological approaches to religion, but also in studies of roles of sacred centres or pilgrimage. In many other perspectives, the temporal aspects of religion (routine, crisis rituals and rites de passage, conversion, calendar) have been foregrounded, place has been reduced to a mere setting. This paper attempts at reconstructing religious action as a spatial practice that is sensitive to and creative of the character of settlements. On that basis, it tries to develop a grid of analytical perspectives for the interaction of religion with urban space, based on a concept of religion that takes prayer as a basic form of religious communication.
ReligioCity: Towards a Theory of Urban Religion and Religion in Urbanity
Religion and Urbanity Online
This article offers the concept of ReligioCity as a way to theorize and understand both the tangible and intangible aspects of the reciprocal relations between city and religion. This theoretical notion joins together the imaginative aspects of being religious in an urban context and the tangible aspects (materialities) of religion by privileging neither one nor the other. ReligioCity, enables us to explore the ways religion and urban space are transformed together by current socio-political processes, but also to examine the ways the city’s landscape encompasses new expressions of religious materiality in the urban environment. The empirical context is drawn mostly from Acre, a multi-religious, multi-ethnic city in the north of Israel. The article further suggests ReligioCity as a theoretical concept which may advance research of both historical and contemporary cities.
On the modern-secular religious City: a theologico-political mapping and prospective
n Abstract: Contemporary international politics has been characterized as dominated by the return of the religious or by a new visibility of religion. An assessment of that characterization, a true understanding of our temporality, seems to require a meditation on the place of the religious in the modern age. In the following essay it will be argued that the modern determinations of the Political have not simply " abandoned " the " religious form " but are now concretely sites of new mundane/immanent Supreme Goods/ Supreme Values – of Summa Bona that sometimes may even be imagined unique, exclu‑ sive and unlimited sources of all value and normativity and as substances of a form of life. Those determinations will also appear as res mixtae, as spaces of confusion between " politics " and the " traditional‑religious ". § 1.º
Toward a Mutual Change of Religion and Urban Space: A Comparative Perspective
Wawasan, 2023
From a historical perspective, cities have served as more than mere locations where religious practices are observed; they have consistently exhibited an elevated level of historical documentation. The claim advanced here is that the interrelationship between religious change and urban development necessitates thorough analysis. It is imperative to critically examine the significant developments in local and trans-local religions, particularly emphasising their distinct urban contextual factors. At the same time, such urban conditions, the practices, and discourse that shape the understanding of these conditions as urban are not independent variables in the study of religious change. Rather, they are influenced by religious practices and individuals, thereby forming a reciprocal relationship. The choice of areas is an assumption that the pertinent aspect in establishing a connection is the spatial character of religious practices and ideas and their material manifestation in physical space. The article concisely examines various aspects related to the transformation of urban spaces and religious practices. These include the process of monumentalising urban areas and gods, the public display and the articulation of communication with God and gods, the imaginative and widespread utilisation of scripture in religious activities and thought, the increasing division of labour and professionalisation, the emergence of individual urban actors who are not solely defined by their ancestral lineage, the formation of religious groups, the religious organisation of time and the influence of temporal concepts on religious ideas and practices, and lastly, the conceptualisation of alternatives to urban life through the religious exaggeration of rural and natural environments. Such a cursory review of religious changes in urban settings and their impact on urbanism does not yield any definitive assertions on these developments. However, the collective evidence confirms the effectiveness of the presented approach.
Geographies of postsecular rapprochement in the city
Progress in Human Geography
This paper explores the emergence of urban spaces of partnership between people of faith and those of no religious faith who come together to offer care, welfare and justice to socially excluded people. The activities of such groups are understood in terms of adjustments to the secularization thesis pointing to the possibilities of a series of emerging geographies relating to postsecular rapprochement and different forms of reterritorialization in the city. In particular, the accounts of postsecularism by Klaus Eder and Jurgen Habermas are used to explain both how the hushed-up voice of religion is being released back into the public sphere in some settings, and how the assimilation and mutually reflexive transformation of secular and theological ideas may represent crossover narratives around which postsecular partnerships can converge around particular ethical precepts and practical needs. Taking the particular example of Christian religion in western Europe, the paper traces both how a critique of secularism has led to some instances of contemporary political expression underpinned by theological precepts that are converted into practical ethics, and how a greater propensity among the Christian faith to explore faith-by-praxis has fuelled increased activity in the public sphere. Not all such activity can be regarded as postsecular, but emergent spaces of postsecular partnership in the city offer possibilities for new, perhaps liminal, geographies of resistance that cannot be explained away as simply the incorporation of religious capital into neoliberal governance. The possibilities of mutually transformative possibilities in these partnerships open both politics and faith up to processes of poststructural reterritorializing as part of the faith-in-practice of postsecularism.