Sacred Time Research Articles

Domesticating the Cosmic: Elemental Fire and the Tamil Festival of Lights

This article is about the calendrical, climactic and especially cosmological implications of Karthigai Deepam, an ancient Tamil celebration pivoted around the lighting of lamps that precedes Deepavali, the quintessential, ubiquitous but also comparatively recent festival of lights. Karthigai Deepam signals the end of the rains, intensifying winter chills and winds and shorter days. Juxtaposing festival observances in homes and those in temples, I demonstrate how its overriding concerns with generating light and warmth are part of ritual efforts to defend against elemental and existential threats of darkness and cold. Linking sacred time and mythical events with chronological time and human activities, this calendrical ritual joins together the divine and the mortal. Tracing the movement of fire and its various iterations as it traverses and connects the natural, cosmic, temple and home, this festival, I propose, renders the cosmic intimate and the intimate cosmic. Some rituals not only embody but also put cosmology into dynamic practice.

Sosyal Öğrenme Bağlamında Kutsal Zaman Kültürüne Disiplinlerarası Bir Bakış

The coexistence of religion and culture emerges in folk beliefs at sacred times. Sacred times play a mediating role between God and his believers. The endeavour to access the Sacred Being results in the productivity of human beings and cultural heritage. Religious references on sacred time are associated with the behaviours of people and enable the emergence of many cultural elements. The representation of the Sacred over time creates "the culture of sacred time" unique to each society. Cultural practices in different forms at sacred times contribute to the acquisition of religious feelings and behaviours in religious education. The study aims to reveal the contribution of the culture of sacred time to the development of behaviour through social learning in religious education. Since the phenomenon of sacred time is a common problem in folklore and religious sciences, the study is carried out by interdisciplinary approach. The method of the study is systematic literature review on the resources of both disciplines. The study reveals the contribution of the culture of sacred time to the development of religious behaviours through Bandura's social learning theory and Vygotsky's cognitive development theory.

Temporality, Urbanity, and Religion: Reconsidering Sacred Time in Ancient and Modern Cities

Temporality, Urbanity, and Religion: Reconsidering Sacred Time in Ancient and Modern Cities

Typological Features of Historical Myth

The article constructs an image of the modern historical myth based on the ideas about the constant presence of mythical structures in human consciousness and experience. It is noted that the historical myth is well fixed at the level of perception of the past by non-specialized forms of consciousness of the average person, i.e. at the level of his/her historical memory. The very image of the historical myth appears as a set of such structures of mythical experience as mythical substance, sacrum, mythical arche, mythical time, and mythical space. Mythical substance (essence) is the very phenomenon of the national, which is identically "poured" throughout the entire temporal existence of the nation. Mythical arche is the origins, beginnings, and history of the origin of phenomena, objects, and customs. Any myth, in fact, speaks of the origins or what was in the beginning. The model of mythical time is when, on one plane, it is profane time and it is perceived as flowing from the past to the future through the present, that is, it has a direction. On another plane, this time is sacred. This is the First Time when the archaea were created, and therefore it precedes the beginning of the counting of profane, empirical time. Sacred time can penetrate profane time as arche, for example, through the staging of the events of the sacred First Age. The sacred is the experience of the sacred through which significant historical objects are perceived; then, while retaining their own nature, they appear fundamentally different from other historical objects of the everyday profane world. Mythical space is not imagined in the abstract; it is combined with its content, i.e. historical events and facts. In addition, space in mythical perception is not a continuous unity; on the contrary, it is discontinuous. It consists of sacred objects and places.

Vesions of Sacred Time in Germanic Mythology

Germanic mythology offers one of the most ambiguous representations of the universe. Time has a special connotation as the mortality of the gods conditions their response to the challenges set by destiny before them. Much of their existence depends on the way they accomplish their quest to find the ultimate answer. In the Germanic myths time can be cosmic corresponding to the creation of the world or eschatological as the end of the universe is inevitable and certain. In between these two moments the gods need to discover the answer to the meaning of their lives and their place in the universe.

Dorsality, and: Reencountered, Months Later

Dorsality, and: Reencountered, Months Later Travis Chi Wing Lau (bio) Keywords Travis Chi Wing Lau, poem Dorsality When I let him touchthe small of my backfor the first time, I thought a finwould erupt forth— to ground mewhile I learned to breathe in new waters,this first and sacred time when I was becomingsomething else entirely too slick,for the flesh I know must stay in motionor risk never moving again. [End Page 743] Reencountered, Months Later i saw you when he sought care beside meat the clinic that always runs hours behind one where more men go than comeout of impatience to court some other urgencythat feels better than a test of blood you were there in the same shirt I took offand did not bother to look me dead in the eyes you claimed were littlebitter almonds that knew more than they should because the last thing you did was hurry toescort me down the hard stairs that would break no fall after I relented and realizedthe cold of it the cold of you a persistence that gets to claim innocencewhere the no never comes only the yes skips in the recording offering but theshallowest relief of a rehearsal we both do [End Page 744] that leaves a collision of two less slipperythan it in fact always already was as I walked out of your brownstonei bathed in the coolness of former heat slowly buffeted by what i could not seeyet knew encircled me the beginning of a familiarsiege [End Page 745] Travis Chi Wing Lau travis chi wing lau (he/him/his) is assistant professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham's Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and Hypertext, as well as in three chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press), Paring (Finishing Line Press), and Vagaries (Fork Tine Press, 2022). Copyright © 2022 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Book Review: The Congregation in a Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life by Andrew Root

Book Review: <i>The Congregation in a Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life</i> by Andrew Root

Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East. A Historical Perspective, written by Daniella Talmon-Heller

Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East. A Historical Perspective, written by Daniella Talmon-Heller

Gods, Games, and Globalization: New Perspectives on Religion and Sport

Gods, Games, and Globalization: New Perspectives on Religion and Sport

Book Review: Christine Valters Paintner, Sacred Time: Embracing an Intentional Way of Life

Book Review: Christine Valters Paintner, <i>Sacred Time: Embracing an Intentional Way of Life</i>

Daniella Talmon-Heller. Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East: A Historical Perspective

Daniella Talmon-Heller. Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East: A Historical Perspective

Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East: A Historical Perspective By Daniella Talmon-Heller

<i>Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East: A Historical Perspective</i> By Daniella Talmon-Heller

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East: A Historical Perspective

Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East: A Historical Perspective

Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East: A Historical Perspective, by Daniella Talmon-Heller.

Sacred Place and Sacred Time in the Medieval Islamic Middle East: A Historical Perspective, by Daniella Talmon-Heller. Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture, Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 279pp., 28 illustrations, 1 additional map, index. Hb. £80. ISBN-13: 9781474460965.

Time-famine, resource obsession and the good life in a pandemic

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper explores the argument that human action cannot be understood apart from embodied imaginations of what is good and of what it means to be living a good life. Drawing particularly on the thought of the sociologist Hartmut Rosa, it explores how COVID-19 relates to the concept of ‘time-famine’, and how this thrusts many of us into a crisis of the good life. From this exploration the paper offers some open and preliminary thoughts about what impact this crisis of time and the good life has on local congregations.This paper is adapted from chapter 12 of The Congregation in the Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time Against the Speed of Modern Life by Andrew Root © 2021 Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/ and is used by kind permission of the publisher.

The Nature of Sacred Time

In his essay, I examine the nature of sacred time, focusing primarily though not exclusively on two aspects of sacred time: that it is “set aside” from use and that in this time human beings can be in union and communion with and in God. I argue that chronological, “clock” time and Heideggerian “datable” (in-order-to) time are incapable of being directly consecrated as sacred time. In order to understand sacred time, I investigate the Fall and how this results in an essentially instrumentalist understanding of the world and time, which has its ultimate motive in the drive for human self-sufficiency. Only against this backdrop can one properly understand the nature (physis) of human temporality and historicity with respect to sacred time as set apart from use and as that time we spend and thus share with Christ, thereby coming into union and communion with God.

Sacred Time and Rabbinic Literature: New Directions for an Old Question

AbstractThis article questions the utility of the term “sacred time.” In other words, it cautions against allowing sacred time to obscure how scholars study the dynamic relations between temporalities and sanctity in classical rabbinic texts (c. 200–550 CE). The achievement of recent Biblical and Jewish studies scholars who rejected characterizations of Hebrew or Jewish time as monolithic was their decoupling of the patterning or shape of events from what it means for time to be holy or for there to be a time for holiness. In the wake of such corrective efforts, scholars can now examine how rabbinic texts engage the quality of holiness as it pertains to durations, human activities, embodied temporal awareness, the time of exegesis, or to God’s time. This article distinguishes God’s time and human moments of recurrence and connection from eternity and sacred time through analysis of late antique Palestinian midrashim and presents directions for future study of holiness and time in classical rabbinic literature.

Toward a Pentecostal Theological Aesthetic and Practice of Sacred Time

Pentecostal ecstatic-aimed oral-aural dynamics, along with other elements integral to the tradition, imply a latent though largely unexplored aesthetic of sacred time. The author begins by assessing this aesthetic through a constructed methodology defined as Pentecostal notions of Festive and Founding Time. From this analysis, he prescriptively delineates five steps for adapting the historic liturgical calendar to Pentecostal spirituality, thereby arguing for a Pentecostal theological aesthetic and practice of sacred time, in a manner related to the tradition’s improvisational aesthetics of oral-aural liturgy. The author concludes by focusing these themes on the notions of aesthetics, suggesting how a Pentecostal theological aesthetic and practice of sacred time may contribute toward an ecumenically shared vision of beauty that transforms worshipers through the Spirit before God in the face of Jesus.

Communication Patterns of Sendhang Si Dhukun as a Javanese Symbol to Balance Javanese Ideology and their Social Environment

The Islamic new year is considered very important for Javanese people, and even the Islamic new year eve, known as Malam Satu Suro, is claimed as a very sacred time. In various areas, Javanese people conduct rituals to welcome this event, such as the one conducted in Sendang Si Dhukun in Parakan subdistrict of Central Java. This paper aims to explain the communication patterns of Sendhang Si Dhukun ritual on Malam Satu Suro ceremony. This research used a descriptive qualitative method. The data used in this research are collected from informants involved in the rituals. The result shows that the ritual cannot be separated from Islamic teaching as it contains a lot of Islamic prayers. In addition, the mixture of Islamic teaching and Javanese culture can be clearly seen in the ritual. The use of Javanese high level (krama) variety and Javanese poetry (kidung) also dominates the communication patterns in the ritual. This indicates that Javanese people adhere to a belief that religion and culture cannot be separated as they can preserve harmonious relation between their ideology and social environment.