Secular Space Research Articles

Interreligious dialogue groups and the mass media

ABSTRACT Interreligious dialogues have received attention since they were introduced as a security policy and social pacification measure after the attack on 9/11. This essay examines the development of interreligious dialogue in Germany as well as the influence of media discourses on interreligious dialogue and asks to what extent they affect the motives, goals and modes of communication of both Muslim and non-Muslim participants. This analysis leads to the thesis that the mass media’s frequent security-policy framing of Islam within issues of integration, violence, and threat has developed interreligious dialogue groups as a space of face-to-face coping processes with the imagined religious conflict. Muslims attend it in order to put Islam in a different and positive frame. For the Christian participants this also presents the opportunity to reach a new relevance of religion in the public secular space.

Religious Reasons and Public Reason: Recalibrating Ireland’s Benevolent Secularism

Liberal regimes in the West are not homogeneous in their application of secular principles. What kind of “secular” state a particular government promotes depends in large part on the strength and influence of the majority religion in that region. This article acknowledges the heuristic value of a recent threefold taxonomy of secularism: passive, assertive, and benevolent forms of secularism. I take issue with and challenge certain institutional privileges granted to the majority religion in one benevolently secular regime, the Republic of Ireland. I consider how benevolent secularism, while remaining benevolent toward religion, can align its application of secularism in the arena of publicly-funded education (primary and secondary education). A politically liberal regime, defined by the idea of public reason, invokes the principle of publicity, namely, that discourse and public policy be intelligible (and acceptable to a large degree) not only to an individual’s religious or moral community but also to the broader collection of members who constitute a liberal state. Drawing on John Rawls’ conception of public reason, and using Ireland as a case study, I show how this particular state-religion interrelation can be recalibrated in order to increase the prospects of reconciliation with a secular space of public reason.

Neighbourliness, conviviality, and the sacred in Athens’ refugee squats

To better understand the range of possibilities and opportunities for (co)existence available to displacement‐affected people, attention must be given to the thick webs of sociality shaping interactions in situations of mass displacement. This paper makes the case that refugee squats in Athens are distinct spaces wherein different understandings of (co)existence converge – spaces whose production is contingent on support from neighbourly relations and networks that are mediated in moments through conceptions of conviviality informed by religion. Based on ethnographic work carried out in 2016 and a spatial analysis of refugee squats in Athens, this paper emphasises neighbourliness and conviviality as they relate to sacred understandings of coexistence. This helps highlight the limits built in to thinking about the movement of refugees from the global South through Euro‐centric ontologies of the social. More than this, following postcolonial debates on the decentring of knowledge production, the research makes manifest how Islamic socio‐cultural memories of jiwār or a right of neighbourliness complicate geographies of humanitarianism that make stark binary assumptions between religious and secular space. In turn, the evidence from Athens indicates that refugee perspectives on neighbourliness are imperfectly translated by migrant rights activists as solidarity, obscuring the different ways Muslim structures of feeling contribute to the production of refugee squats.

Making Space for Politics: the Gift of Public Theology in the Work of John Webster

Abstract The theologian John Webster (d. 2016) is sometimes criticized for having little to say about politics. This article seeks to demonstrate how Webster furnishes a set of conceptual resources that provide the theological and anthropological bases for a Christian public theology, as well as the rationale for the sort of moral reasoning that will give involvement in politics its appropriate shape and content. Webster understands humanity theologically, as creatures of God. The consequence of this position means we must appreciate the (protological and eschatological) givenness of our situation, rejecting the possibility of secular space, and accepting our teleologically-oriented vocation. Webster’s theological anthropology constitutes an indirect challenge, and a clear—and ultimately more compelling—alternative to the political liberalism proposed by John Rawls.

The Third City: The Post Secular Space of the Dardenne Brothers' Seraing

Set principally in or around Seraing, an industrial region in decline just outside of Liège, in Belgium, the films of Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne marry geographical and historical-social realism with a series of ethical inquiries into such topics as immigration, unemployment, black market trading and petty crime. To date, critical commentary on the films has tended mainly to read the work of the Dardennes along two lines. The dominant approach uses the work of Emmanuel Levinas as a philosophical touchpoint in order to illuminate the ethical dimension of the Dardenne brothers' films. The second considers the political dimensions of their films. However a third, related body of writing has emerged in later years, one which understands in terms of their relation to what Jürgen Habermas (2006) , amongst others, has dubbed the postsecular age. This article locates the Dardennes' films at the intersection between the ethical, the political, and the postsecular, looking to the theologically-inflected philosophy of Gillian Rose to make the case that Seraing serves as the model of what Rose refers to as “the third city” – a postsecular site which challenges easy divisions between politics and ethics. As such Seraing is not, I shall argue, a mere staging post for the moral, political and spiritual problems posed by the films, but its cradle. Paying particular attention to the Dardennes' film Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit, 2014) I demonstrate what an engagement that turns on existence with and within the city – an engagement that is both political and ethical – might look like.

The Shrine of St. Winefride and Social Control in Early Modern England and Wales

In 1534, Henry VIII declared himself the supreme head of the Church of England. In the years that followed, his advisors carried out an agenda to reform the Church. In 1536, the Crown condemned pilgrimages and the veneration of saints’ shrines and relics. By the end of the seventeenth century, nearly every shrine in England and Wales had been destroyed or fell into disuse except for St. Winefride’s shrine in Holywell, Wales. The shrine has continued to be a pilgrimage destination to the present day without disruption. Contemporary scholars have credited the shrine’s survival to its connections with the Tudor and Stuart regimes, to the successful negotiation for its shared use as both a sacred and secular space, and to the missionary efforts of the Jesuits. Historians have yet to conduct a detailed study of St. Winefride’s role in maintaining social order in recusant communities. This article argues that the Jesuits and pilgrims at St. Winefride’s shrine cooperated to create an alternative concept of social order to the legal and customary orders of Protestant society.

“Historical-Critical Ministry? The Biblical Studies Classroom as Restorative Secular Space”

AbstractThis article revisits the past decades of scholarly use (or rather non-use) of Bernadette Brooten's Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue to reveal that citation practices in biblical studies—or any field—can be inherently political (e.g. misogynistic) whilst maintaining a pretence of scientific objectivity. As a corrective, the author calls for the abandonment of the myth of neutrality in the biblical studies classroom. She argues that rape is only one end of a long spectrum of behaviours that silence; at the other, more subtle end of that spectrum, and all along it, are thousands of lesser instances of silencing and diminishing that occur in the classroom, that are gentler extensions of the notion that women's bodies do not belong to them, that men are the default human beings, and that women are valuable only insofar as they are pleasing or useful from a male standpoint. Parks advocates a biblical studies pedagogy that intentionally upholds inclusion and diversity in its curriculum, its group dynamics, and its citation practices, even (or especially) within institutions that do not. This is especially important given the prevalence of survivors of sexual assault and gender-based violence in every classroom; maintaining a neutral stance implicitly re-inscribes and encourages the status quo of rape culture.

Religion, schooling and the state: negotiating and constructing the secular space

As a prelude to the paper it should be stated that its genesis originates in conference presentations delivered on two separate occasions to two separate audiences. The first was to a mixed group of teacher educators, Roman Catholic priests and nuns, as well as others from diverse religious traditions, at a one-day conference on religion and pluralism held in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. The expressed focus for this conference was ‘inter-faith’ but with the addition of a secular dimension. The second presentation was to an international group largely comprised of comparative education scholars in Glasgow, Scotland. Although the two presentations were broadly similar in content the Dublin paper had a distinct orientation. Given that the publicly-funded Irish school system was characterised by a strong involvement of religion (Department of Education and Skills, 2017) – in particular, that of the Roman Catholic Church, the dominant tradition in that country – the Dublin presentation pursued an approach which sought to widen the educational agenda. Specifically, it focused upon the continuing discussion concerning the role of secularity in school systems where confessional approaches to religion were sanctioned by the central state. On the other hand, the Glasgow presentation was more ‘academic’ in tone, seeking to re-position secularity and religion in a non-oppositional relationship which was, in turn, argued to be functional for 21st education systems.

American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow: Building Churches for the Future, 1925–1975 by Catherine R. Osborne

Reviewed by: American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow: Building Churches for the Future, 1925–1975 by Catherine R. Osborne Jillian Plummer Catherine R. Osborne, American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow: Building Churches for the Future, 1925–1975 ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 288 pages. Catherine Osborne's American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow historicizes one of the most dramatic changes of the U.S. Catholic Church in the late twentieth century: the movement away from medieval-inspired churches to shopping mall chapels, churches with ecumenical spaces, and floating congregations. And yet as Osborne shows, this movement away from medieval architecture was also about new theology. Catholic modernists "claimed the future of churches as vital to a renewed ecclesiology (or theory about the nature of the Church), and as critically connected to a renewed eschatology (the theology of the redemption of creation)" (4). Through an analysis of buildings and architectural plans as well as through the voices of those people who imagined, built, and used these spaces, Osborne argues that how American Catholics imagined their churches intersected with how they envisioned the future. Across six chapters, Osborne suggests that American Catholics' engagement with evolutionary science, modern architectural trends, and new theology espoused before and simultaneously with Vatican II fueled conversations about the parish of the future. She focuses this analysis on the period between 1925 to 1975. Most visions for the future church were not built in the period before the Second Vatican Council. Yet in the early twentieth century, Osborne shows how American Catholics borrowed images from architectural discourse, which used biological metaphors, and language from the [End Page 97] theology of Henri de Lubac, S.J., and Yves Congar, O.P., which characterized the Church as "living" and "organic," to discuss futuristic churches. By the mid-twentieth century, Osborne illustrates how the availability of reinforced concrete opened up new possibilities for architects who imagined constructing churches that might unify a congregation during Mass and also focus a congregation's attention on the altar (80, 100, 102). In the second half of the book, Osborne details how American Catholics used the eschatology elaborated by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., Harvey Cox, and the Second Vatican Council to experiment with where the celebration of Mass took place (14). For example, she discusses how the theology articulated in the Second Vatican Council's "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World" (Gaudium et Spes) and Harvey Cox's The Secular City inspired American Catholics' new visions for urban parishes in the mid-1960s. Encouraged by this theology that blurred the divide between sacred and secular space, American Catholics attempted to increase the visibility of the Church in the inner-city among marginalized populations. Other Catholics, influenced by this same theology, envisioned creating shared spaces that might foster ecumenism. Yet by the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially with the implementation of the Council's "Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy" (Sacrosanctum Concilium) and its continued reinterpretation among the faithful, American Catholics began to raise more radical questions about what exactly a church ought to be. In order to discuss this post-conciliar period of uncertainty, Osborne focuses her attention on American Catholics who formed "non-territorial parishes." The community of John XXIII in Oklahoma City, for instance, decided not to construct buildings in order to avoid debt so that they had more freedom to serve their local community and worship in different locations across the city (212, 213). While Osborne alludes to the conflict among American Catholics in the period after the Council, future scholarship will more comprehensively reveal the uneasy reaction by some Catholics to these futuristic churches. One of the most impressive feats of the book is Osborne's wide-ranging analysis of American Catholic modernist architecture across the United States. She considers futuristic churches from coast to coast: from the construction of the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, Arizona, to sanctuary renovations in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Over the course of this book, readers learn that discussions about the Church's future in relationship to their worship spaces transpired among American Catholics in seminaries, in convents, in the pews, and in non-territorial parishes...

Islam and the Question of Confessional Religious Identity: The Islamic State, Apostasy, and the Making of a Theology of Violence

The Islamic State (ISIS) has sought to realign the role of public religion in the modern secular space by proclaiming to contest all forms of apostasy and re-interrogate the conceptual formulations of belief/unbelief in Islam. Through such quests for realignment, it has sought to revive the medieval debate on the question of confessional religious identity which involved definitional disputations concerning true Muslims. The debate surfaced during the formative phase of the Muslim society and led to the engendering of competing sectarian religiosities. For the Islamic State, its urge for reviving this medieval discourse on confessional religious identity of Muslims is embedded in a romantic vision of the abode of pure Islam, to be inhabited only by true Muslims. However, such a geopolitical imaginary is deeply grounded in a sectarian Sunni political ontology coupled with a prejudicial interpretation of jihad. To accomplish its objectives and for enunciating the attributes of the land of pure Islam, the organization has transformed the Qur’an, which is in the intransitive form, into a transitive form so as to theologize the sacred text into a radical instrument of violence. It has also attempted to transfigure the spiritual character of Islam, referred to as the deen (a pluralistic system), into a cult.

Islam w przestrzeni publicznej laickiej Francji

<p>Religia jest ważnym i nieodłącznym zjawiskiem życia ludzkiego. Odgrywa istotną rolę w tworzeniu porządku moralnego i społecznego. Zmiany religijności wywołują zmiany porządku społecznego. Cechą współczesnych społeczeństw europejskich jest desakralizacja rzeczywistości, przesunięcie sacrum do przestrzeni prywatnej i coraz prężniej rozwijający się proces laicyzacji. Na tym tle Francja jest państwem, w którym świeckość jest jedną z najważniejszych wartości republikańskich, ważnym elementem tożsamości narodowej.</p><p>Celem artykułu jest weryfikacja hipotezy zakładającej konieczność znalezienia miejsca dla islamu w laickiej przestrzeni publicznej, zważywszy, że islamu nie można unowocześnić, zracjonalizować ani zintegrować z przestrzenią laicką Francji. Przeprowadzona w artykule analiza została oparta na trzech metodach badawczych: metodzie historycznej, instytucjonalno-prawnej oraz metodzie analizy treści. Artykuł podzielono na pięć części: geneza i ewolucja laickości we Francji, istota laickości we Francji, spór o muzułmańską chustę – początek dyskusji na temat miejsca islamu w laickiej przestrzeni oraz kultu muzułmańskiego. Świecki model Republiki staje w konfrontacji z islamem coraz bardziej widocznym w przestrzeni publicznej Francji. Afera wokół chusty muzułmańskiej, noszenie symboli religijnych, żywność halal, miejsca kultu muzułmańskiego i wiele innych spornych kwestii dzieli dzisiejszą Francję na zwolenników włączenia islamu w przestrzeń publiczną i część radykalną. Konieczność redefinicji laickości francuskiej jest jednym z najważniejszych wyzwań V Republiki.</p>

Sacred Romanesque Architecture of Knights Hospitaller in the Polish Lands

The Romanesque Knights Hospitaller’s churches on the Polish Lands are only a fracture of the catalogue of the medieval architecture. Despite their small contribution to the history of the Church, they are extraordinary elements of the rich history of the Piast State. The paper will be based on historical studies on the history of the Order of Hospitallers; both in the Holy Land and, above all, in the Polish lands. The supplement will be research in the field of archeology concerning the main architecture, particular elements of which became the basis of developing the topic of Romanesque churches belonging to the Knights of St. John. The results of the research allow, to a large extent, to supplement and verify information about specific churches based on historical context. As a result, the presentation of the chosen churches mainly in Silesia and Pomerania will be based on the development of their original shape. These are used to present the development of endowment, their worship, ideological links and the functioning of the church as a temple in secular space. The presentation of the expansion of medieval culture of the Maltese Order allows a better understanding of their modest contribution to the development of Romanesque sacred constructions.

Sacred Spaces

The passage from sacred to secular space confers on religious space a wider functionality that will allow the incorporation of an abstract and open spatial symbolism to different perceptions of the divine to see, feel or invoke God. According to Rudolf Otto, on the Protestant churches the architectonic expression of the numinous is made by three fundamental elements of representation: obscurity, silence and emptiness. As elements that conceptually oppose the concrete or definitive symbol, they acquire a universal meaning that modern architecture itself will incorporate as a process of artistic emancipation.For a contemporary architect to design a religious space thus imposes an inevitable incursion into this Protestant matrix that appeals to the simplicity of forms, to the fidelity of construction and to the aesthetic experience as access to the transcendent. The mortuary chapels I am presenting takes up this contact with the modern constructive knowledge and with the return to the essential sacred place made of space, light and matter.

Women’s everyday spirituality in Diamond Way Buddhism: an auto-photographic study

ABSTRACTThe Western world is experiencing increasing popularity of new religious movements whose adherents tend to spirituality, a subjective, personal form of religion. These spiritual forms shape the spaces of everyday life, their meanings, perceptions, and experiences, which is starting to be reflected in new geographies of religion. In Czechia, one of the most rapidly growing new religious movements is Diamond Way Buddhism. This contribution focuses on how Diamond Way spirituality is lived and experienced in space. The paper explores this phenomenon using the method of auto-photography. We asked six women to photograph places important to them in their daily lives and interpret their spiritual meaning. This method allows exploration of women’s spirituality in the everyday spaces where it is perceived and experienced, such as kitchens, buses, or natural sites. The results show that women have a specific way of experiencing Buddhism in seemingly secular space which they describe through feminine characteristics of transcendence. Everyday spaces become spiritual through the subjects’ emotional and continual experiencing of Buddhism, while the officially sacred space of a Buddhist center is incorporated into everyday life activities of women. The division between sacred and secular spaces often described by scholars is therefore challenged.

‘Resacralising’ secular space: new churches in a northern city, 1980–2012

This article explores the way new church congregations in a city in northern England, the city of York, are using religious and non-religious spaces in which to meet. These new congregations show a diverse approach to the material realm and especially to sacred space. Some use existing church buildings, some build their own structures. But many use a range of buildings: schools, community centres, a pub or the garage of a private house. An examination of these structures offers insights into ways in which faith engages with wider social realities and into contemporary religious history. This article will focus primarily on Britain, but casts an eye to developments elsewhere.

‘Burqa Avenger’: Law and Religious Practices in Secular Space

The current debate over the hijab is often understood through the lens of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between a tolerant ‘secular’ ‘West’ and a chauvinist ‘religious’ ‘East’. The article argues that this polarization is the result of a specific secular semiotic understanding of religion and religious practices which is nowadays embedded in western law. In my analysis, secular’s normative assumptions, played around the control of women’s bodies and the definition of religious symbols in the public sphere, work as a marker of ‘citizenship’ and ‘racialized religious belonging’. Through women’s bodies, western/secular law creates a link between gender, religion, ethnicity and belonging which forms a specific law and religious subject. Thus, secularism emerges not as the separation between private and public, state and religion, but as the reconfiguration of religious practices and sensitivities in the public secular space through the control of the visible.

Growing Down Like a Banana: Solomon Islands Village Women Changing Gender Norms

This article presents Solomon Islands village women’s opinions about gender norms. It explores their perceptions of their ability to be involved in leadership roles and decision-making, and their analysis of how they conceive of their abilities changing. It attempts to unravel the ‘push-pull’ experience for Solomon Islands rural women—a push towards modernity equated with gender equity and development, and the pull of traditional gender roles for women embedded in notions of what it means to be a good Solomon Islander woman. It concludes that women’s empowerment must be viewed as a journey that encompasses women’s strategic and practical interests relating to agency in a variety of locations. This article contributes to understanding some aspects to women’s empowerment and how international NGOs and other development entities may have a role in creating space for women’s self-reflection, public commentary and visibility in secular social space.

The Struggle to Make Sacred Places in the Secular Space of Los Angeles

The Struggle to Make Sacred Places in the Secular Space of Los Angeles

Secular space, spiritual community and the hybrid urbanisms of Christianity in Hong Kong and Singapore

This article seeks to explain the rapid growth of evangelical Christianity in Hong Kong and Singapore over the last few decades in the adaptation of Christianity to the secular urbanization experienced in the two cities. The author argues that Christian responses involve both the innovation of Christian territorial practices to meaningfully navigate and engage the planned city as well as community practices seeking to produce place-bound Christian community life. The author shows that the innovation was driven by the postcolonial aspirations of Christians reacting to state-led urbanization to resolve decolonization crises in the 1970s and 1980s. Local churches with differing theological beliefs experimented with various hybrid territorial-community spatial practices adapted to the respective urban contexts. When urban redevelopment was intensified by the respective states to transform Hong Kong and Singapore into global cities, the Christians contributed and participated in the reurbanization and globalization of the two cities.

God Pictures in Korean Contexts: The Ownership and Meaning of Shaman Paintings by Laurel Kendall, Jongsung Yang, and Yul Soo Yoon

Reviewed by: God Pictures in Korean Contexts: The Ownership and Meaning of Shaman Paintings by Laurel Kendall, Jongsung Yang, and Yul Soo Yoon Boudewijn Walraven God Pictures in Korean Contexts: The Ownership and Meaning of Shaman Paintings, by Laurel Kendall, Jongsung Yang, and Yul Soo Yoon, Honolulu, University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016, ix + 161 pp. Shamans of the Hwanghae province tradition bring colorful paintings of the selection of deities they worship in large suitcases to all their major rituals, to be hung on the walls of the space where the ritual is held. The status of these pictures is ambiguous. When they have served their purpose and are put back in the suitcase, they are briskly folded and handled with relative insouciance. Anyone around to help can do it. Nonetheless, in other ways it becomes clear that the paintings have power and need to be treated with circumspection. The god pictures have to be fêted with a ritual from time to time; they have to ‘‘play.’’ When there are too many paintings to actively ‘‘participate’’ in the [End Page 182] ritual while hanging on the walls, with the lavish offerings piled up in front of them, the shaman may pick up a suitcase full of folded pictures and briefly dance with it in her arms to give the deities inside, too, their share of attention. If ritually neglected the pictures may harm their owners, causing all kinds of misfortune. In one case I have encountered, the neglect was supposed to have caused problems with the organization of an international conference the owner, who had inherited the paintings from her shaman mother, was preparing for. These god pictures are paraphernalia, things to be used and to be replaced when worn, as well as concrete and powerful manifestations of the deities. It may also happen that a shaman points at a painting and says, ‘‘that’s me’’ when it depicts the personal spirit who is the most determining influence in her or his life. This is an extreme example of the more general close personal relationship shamans tend to have with the paintings of the deities they worship. The ambiguity of Korean shaman paintings, and not just of the Hwanghae tradition, is at the heart of God Pictures, a short but important book, which devotes much needed attention to what, following Appadurai, we have come to call the ‘‘social life’’ of the objects used in Korean shamanism. It demonstrates vividly that material objects are closely intertwined with immaterial things. The authors emphasize the agency of the paintings as perceived not only by the shamans and their clients, but also by collectors, in this respect inspired by Alfred Gell, who has noted that not only primitive animists but also our contemporaries tend to attribute causation to inanimate objects (in his parlance, they ‘‘abduct’’ causation from the objects). Furthermore, they also heed ‘‘Gell’s suggestion that relationships between humans and objects be studied in the manner that anthropologists study other kinds of relationships,’’ relationships that are ‘‘fluid, contingent, and open to debate’’ (121). Given this approach, their conclusion not surprisingly is that there are no simple, unequivocal answers to the question what is the meaning of the god paintings. Instead, they present an intriguing and finely argued overview of the options. The complexity of the matter is reinforced by the fact that the paintings (again as active agents, by provoking desire) have aroused the interest of outsiders. It is one of the strengths of this book that the discussion is not limited to the meaning of the god paintings in their original ritual context, their relationships with the shamans and their clients, but takes into account the full range [End Page 183] of their contemporary ‘‘life.’’ Aiming to study the actual state of affairs in the early twenty-first century, the book reflects on ‘‘the circulation of shaman paintings from sacred to secular space’’ (4), asking what happens if god paintings become commercial items to be bought by collectors and achieve the status of art, and inquires whether the pictures lose their sacredness and power when displayed on the walls of a museum (tentative answer: not always or not for everyone). Interestingly...