Making Sacred Secular Spaces (original) (raw)

Searching for New Sacred Space

With dramatic changes in organized religion and changing concepts of spirituality, how can architecture respond? This article reports on a architecture design graduate studio in which the authors with their students explored the architecture of possible new sacred space.

Negotiating Spaces Within Religion

Unit 4 in the Block 6 'Religion' Course 'Women and Social Structure' MA programme Women's and Gender Studies offered by the Indira Gandhi National Open University , New Delhi, India http://egyankosh.ac.in/handle/123456789/1433/simple-search?filterquery=Ganneri%2C+Namrata+R.&filtername=author&filtertype=equals

The Oxford Handbook of Religious Space

The Oxford Handbook of Religious Space, 2022

How do we understand religious spaces? What is their role or function within specific religious traditions or with respect to religious experience? This handbook brings together thirty-seven authors who address these questions using a range of methods to analyze specific spaces or types of spaces around the world and across time. Their methods are grounded in many disciplines: religious studies and religion, anthropology, archaeology, architectural history and architecture, cultural and religious history, sociology, gender and women’s studies, geography, and political science, resulting in a distinctly interdisciplinary collection. These chapters are snapshots, each offering a specific way to think about the religious space(s) under consideration: Roman shrines, Jewish synagogues, Christian churches, Muslim and Catholic shrines, indigenous spaces in Central America and East Africa, cemeteries, memorials, and others. They are organized here by geographical region, rather than tradition, to emphasize the cultural roots of religion and religious spaces. Several overarching principles emerge from these snapshots. The authors demonstrate that religious spaces are simultaneously individual and collective, personal, and social; that they are influenced by culture, tradition, and immediate circumstances; and that they participate in various relationships of power. Most importantly, these essays demonstrate that religious spaces do not simply provide a convenient background for religious action but are also constituent of religious meaning and religious experience; that is, they play an active role in creating, expressing, broadcasting, maintaining, and transforming religious meaning and experience. Browse it at https://bit.ly/3VpmCdI.

Evolving Faith and Spirituality in Post-Secular Times

This is an exploration of the changing landscape of religious institutions and the importance of of dialogue with those who both stay and leave these churches and look for community, inspiration and opportunities of service in more secular contexts.

Spirituality in Secular Spaces: Constructing a Practical Missional Ecclesiology

2024

How are people outside of our church institutions experiencing God’s Presence in a spiritually meaningful way, and what implications does this have for the Church’s understanding of ecclesiology? Can the ministry of lay people bridge the gap between our increasingly declining church institutions and the robust spiritual expressions of people outside those institutions? In this paper, I construct a practical missional ecclesiology that seeks to inform our religious institutions on new, expansive ways to relate to people unlikely to self-select into an explicitly religious experience. This paper reframes Millennial secularity as a form of everyday spirituality, affirms the significance of these mundane activities by drawing on literature about spirituality and reflecting on the orientation of embodied spiritual practices, and proposes a missional posture and pedagogical approach which empowers lay people as central to the living out of missio Dei, thus engaging and supporting meaningful mundane spiritual practices and embodied spiritual formation outside of the institutional church structure. I provide an example of spiritually meaningful practice in a secular space with an ethnographic case study on the experiences of Certified KonMari Consultants, people working as professional organizers using Marie Kondo’s decluttering method. I then ground these explorations by demonstrating an implementation of this ecclesiology through a pedagogical curriculum I developed to equip lay people to engage in the spiritually rich spaces in their own lives which lie outside the church, fostering a deeper awareness of God’s Presence and a sense of purpose rooted in missio Dei for their own lives. As religiosity shifts in our contemporary culture, the Church must shift its perspective as well to ensure that an orthodox but adaptive future is possible.

Missing the Forest for the Trees - Spiritual Religion in a Secular Age

Toronto Journal of Theology, 2018

The rising popularity of the “spiritual but not religious” moniker across Canada and the West more generally has confounded scholars and laypersons alike. Against those who view the discursive shift from “religion” to “spirituality” in the twenty-first century as evidence of the incoherence of the contemporary spiritual land- scape, I argue that, despite its apparent diversity, much of what goes by “spirituality” among this cohort exhibits striking uniformity in its basic structure. The implicit argu- ment, then, is that observers who decry the fuzziness and indeterminacy of spirituality have focused too much on superficial differences at the expense of underlying simi- larities. In short, they have missed the forest for the trees. I begin by placing the rise of the spiritual but not religious in historical context. In this task, I follow philosopher Charles Taylor, whose insights into the massive subjective turn of modern culture have rarely been surpassed. I then outline the basic characteristics of the spiritual frame- work underlying the shift from religion to spirituality—what I call “self-spirituality.” Drawing from my qualitative research with Canadian millennials, I seek to locate self-spirituality within the current social and political landscape. Finally, in locating self-spirituality within a particular religious tradition, I turn to the social thought of Ernst Troeltsch, whose perceptive observations, made at the outset of the twentieth century, remain invaluable for making sense of recent religious developments. As we shall see, in light of Troeltsch’s insights, the rise of the spiritual but not religious looks quite different from what many have imagined.