Secular Space Research Articles

INTERIOR SPACE IN THE PORTRAITS OF THE MASTERS OF FRENCH ROSSIKA IN THE END OF THE XVIII - EARLY XIX CENTURIES

The interior in a portrait plays an important role in creation of secular space. Russian interior in late 18th – early 19th centuries reflected the trends of different styles, the influence of European culture and the continuity of the ancient heritage. Rossika reflected the life of Russian society in different ways - from creation of ideals and symbolic interpretations of the environment to transmission of traditions, customs and the ways of life, comfort and warm atmosphere of Russian homes and tastes of the aristocracy. Along with the traditional images of ceremonial interior, the French masters reflected the interiors of a cabinet and chamber type. The works of Rossika reflect the Enlightenment epoch with its humanistic ideals and ideas of the noble way of life and scientific progress. The interiors in the portraits of French Rossika are marked with the versatile language of classicism, laconic expressiveness of the composite space, special attention to the social symbolism. The entourage details of the portraits by French painters disclose the idea of the works, reflecting the diverse interaction of the personality with the social environment. The interiors reflect the historical situation and the conceptual ideas of those times, describing the trends of style and fashion in aristocratic circles. The high artistic level reflects the cultural continuity of the heritage of Rossika portraits and its link with the entire civilized world.

Issue of Waqf in the Context of Establishment of Muslim Institutions in the Post-Soviet Tatarstan

The importance of the issue under study is specified by the increasing significance of the religious factor in the social and political, religious and cultural life of global community and Russia in the 21st century. The aim of the article is to find out and analyze the tendencies of the development of Waqf system among Tatars at the end of the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st centuries, to determine the possibilities of religious institutions’ financing by means of engaging and adapting such traditional instruments as Waqf to the modern conditions. The main method of the research is historical and comparative method, at the example of successful existence of Waqf property in the Russian Empire until 1917. Previous experience is compared with the modern state in the realities of the current Russian legislation. The article highlights the impossibility of the unimpaired operation of Waqf institution in the framework of available legal base and in the conditions of secular state. Alongside with this there offered ways of legitimization of separate principles of Waqf institution in the framework of current Russian legislation. The article presents the results indicating historical experience of the functioning of Waqf among Tatar in the past, rather successful existence of Waqf in the sovereign Tatarstan in the 1990s in the framework of local legislation, as well as failed attempts of the local authorities to solve the issue of Waqf property in the federal and all-Russia level. The article materials might be useful in the further study of institutional history of Russian Islam, as well as in modern social discussions about the role of religion in the secular space, and also in forming scientific and methodological, regulatory and legal framework to improve government policy about religion.

Don Juan Tenorio in the Campo de Cebada: restaging urban space after 15-M

The spectacle of the encampments that occupied public plazas throughout Spain during the 15-M protests of 2011 asserted what urban theorist Henri Lefebvre (1968) and others have called the “right to the city.” In a similar vein, the free open-air performances on All Saints' Day in 2011 and 2012 of José Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio by the theater collective AlmaViva Teatro in the self-managed neighborhood space called the Campo de Cebada have also been an effort to reclaim urban space. These performances called Don Juan Tenorio en La Cebada are notable not only for their use of a repurposed vacant lot left abandoned in the wake of the financial crisis but also for their dynamic staging that required the public to move throughout the large vacant lot for each of the play's seven acts. As the public traversed the reappropriated space of the Campo de Cebada, the performance was framed by the urban backdrop created by the bright lights of the Teatro Latina and the adjacent residential apartment buildings. This movement of the public not only foregrounded the trope of mobility evoked by the shifting dramatic spaces within Zorrilla's work but also the mobile and changing character of urban space produced by the perpetual investment and divestment of speculative capital. Just as Don Juan Tenorio journeys from the physical world to the spiritual one and moves from a secular space of individualism to the communal space of heaven, these performances have created an urban experience that promotes community and connection that stands in stark contrast to the cold, individualistic logic of mobile capital and real estate speculation that characterized the economic bubble that preceded the current crisis.

Considerations of dance transmission processes: adapting Bharata Natyam in a Singapore primary school

This qualitative case study has, for its purpose, an examination of the pedagogies and practices of a master Bharata Natyam dance instructor working within a Singapore primary school context. It explores the instructor’s adaptation within an after-school weekly activity of the South Indian traditional classical dance form. Considerations of dance pedagogy through the lens of multiculturalism serve as a springboard for discussion on the findings of the study. The inculcation of values development through the guru–shishya relationship, the adaptation of the dance transmission processes from a religious to a secular space, and the negotiation of the dance form towards relevant contemporary contexts for students within a multicultural context were key points of contemplation towards implications for dance education.

Resisting Institutional Power: The Women of St. Barnabas

ABSTRACTThis article examines the relation between museums exhibiting sacred objects, visitors, and politics. More specifically, it explores the reasons why a minority group of visitors might resist, or even reject, the institutional power of a museum. St. Barnabas Icon Museum, located in the northern part of Cyprus, and a minority group of its visitors—the Women of St. Barnabas—serve as our case study. The two main communities of the island (Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots) perceive the museum in dramatically different ways and use it to support their own claims. The Women of St. Barnabas, a group of Orthodox Christian, Greek Cypriot women, reject the museum and insist on using it as a religious instead of a secular space. The authors argue that apart from religious reasons, political beliefs predominantly shape this group's perceptions and uses of the museum.

Le Jugement dernier de Léon Delmont : déplacements du sacré dans La Modification de Michel Butor

The compartment in A Change of Heart is a secular space. However, the Sacred will gradually invade it through hallucinations of the narrator. Thus an unexpected and fantastic struggle led by the Pope, priests, cardinals, prophets and sibyls against Leon Delmont will cause a change of his initial decision, motivating and justifying the novel’s title.

Secular state, religious lives: Islam and the state in Malaysia

Debates on secularism in Malaysia often revolve around the legal, especially the constitutional, framework. To this end several NGOs organised a road show in 2006 to debate issues surrounding freedom of religion. Not only were these events mobbed by angry crowds, but also the state intervened and shut down these and future discussions on the topic of religion, deeming such debates sensitive. This article addresses the particularities of secularism in Malaysia vis-à-vis Olivier Roy's thesis in ‘Secularism Confronts Islam’ that sees religious space and secular space as discernable yet not antithetical and Charles Taylor's thesis in the ‘Secular Age’, where he points to a new definition of secularism as a pluralist and transcendent notion of belief. In Malaysia both variants are present, with the state playing a dangerous game situating itself between reactionary Muslim forces and a moderate majority.

RELIGIOUS LANDSCAPE, LOW CASTE HINDUS AND THE IDENTITY POLITICS: CONFIGURATION OF SOCIO-RELIGIOUS SPACE FOR WEAKER SECTIONS IN JAMMU CITY, J&K (INDIA)

Dawning of a new century has not been accompanied by the eclipse of religiosity among individuals and in public culture rather because of disenchantment with our increasingly rationalized society, religion continues to provide meaning and intertwine daily social, economic, and political activity of human world. Alongside, the popular religiosity is an important contemporary trend encompassing the world religions. The study of religion as a force in people’s adaptation to and creation of landscape is certainly a proper and important endeavor in the field of sociology of religion. The present work aims at exploring the spatial expansion of subaltern groups in urban setting; socio-religious mobility among lower caste Hindus and the creation of sacred and secular space vis-à-vis higher Hindu caste groups in a sacred traditional Indian city. The broader findings reflect the creation of religious spaces and also the lower caste Hindu identity assertion through these places. The modern forces and the pace of urbanization had diluted the air-tight compartmentalized segregation of the weaker section and paved them way for secular living with the other high caste groups. It had not only brought democratic dwelling space but also provided them dignity with the new level of assertion.

Spatiality and the Performance of Belief: The Public Square and Collective Mourning for John Paul II

The outburst of collective mourning for the death of Pope John Paul II in April 2005 in Piłsudski Square in Warsaw presented an exceptional case of intense religious emotions, expressed through an unprecedented variety of visual forms in a secular public space beyond the limitations of domestic and traditional worship spheres. Using displays of this emotion as a focus, this article considers how complementary theoretical frameworks can generate nuanced accounts of the dynamic intersection of such a space and the performance of belief in late modernity. Drawing on Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s concepts of strategies of religious spatialisation, Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of space as a mise-en-scene for cultural performance, and Erika Fischer-Lichte’s understanding of effects of space in shaping the nature of performance art, I argue that space must be understood as integral to such acts of believing. The meanings and uses of space should be understood as subject to the continuation or disruption of particular chains of memory, the operation of particular institutional strategies and resources, and the ways in which the material environment itself enables or precludes different forms of religious and cultural performance. Space as a condition of performance of belief thus binds together various levels of analysis: from the macro-level of institutional strategies to the micro-dynamics of individual behaviour. These levels of the theoretical framework will be followed along the analysis of stages in the material transformation of the Square. This perspective challenges privatised, propositional accounts of belief, further demonstrating that belief is inseparable from embodied emotion and action, the negotiation of various forms of institutional power, and the affordance of space and material objects.

Saints and the “Long Civil Rights Movement”

In the twentieth-century American South, black religious institutions played key roles in shaping and reshaping urban landscapes. In doing so, these institutions made significant, but often overlooked, contributions to the “Long Civil Rights Movement.” In Memphis, no church better exemplified the intimate intertwining of race, space, and religion than the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). The history of COGIC in Memphis complicates the assumption that the Civil Rights Movement dictated a simple move from segregated black space to racially integrated space and breaks down false spatial dichotomies such as black/white and religious/secular. Instead, COGIC built segregated worship space, moved into white residential space, adapted black religious space for overtly political purposes, and finally, claimed white secular space for black religious purposes. Alongside the properly celebrated deeds of national leaders, local reconfigurations of urban space by religious institutions deserve to be recognized as a prime factor in the long road to civil rights.

Faith and Volunteering in the UK: Towards a Virtuous Cycle for the Accumulation of Social, Religious and Spiritual Capital?

In the context of a communitarian discourse under the New Labour government (1997‒2010), the theoretical concept of social capital as developed by Putnam1 was influential on policy in welfare and community development. Faith communities, particularly those in ethnically and religiously diverse urban areas, were recognised as banks of social capital which could, as it were, be invested for the public good in areas such as urban regeneration, social welfare and - especially after September 2001 - in community cohesion and national security. Since 2010, under the coalition government headed by David Cameron, the notion of 'the Big Society' has been central in policy discourse. Under both governments, voluntary groups, including faithbased congregations and charities, have been urged to play a more significant role in community work and social welfare, and the 'volunteer' is portrayed as the archetypal good citizen. Debates continue as to whether this offers a genuine space for religion to make a contribution in the public sphere and/or whether it is the state seeking to control and exploit the voluntary and faith sectors, in part as a cynical cost-cutting exercise.2 In developing the debate on the relationship between faith and social capital, Baker and colleagues at the William Temple Foundation, drawing on Bourdieu's3 work on different forms of capital, have introduced the notions of 'religious capital' and 'spiritual capital'. In this article it is argued that when considering volunteering in such a theoretical framework, it is essential to examine the relationship of labour to the different forms of capital. One must recognise that volunteers, in supplying unpaid labour to churches and other religious or not-for-profit organisations, are among other things involved in an economic transaction. To what degree is the Marxist view that the accumulation of capital depends on the exploitation of labour relevant in this context? This article considers some of the empirical evidence from recent UK surveys and reports which cover faith and volunteering and which highlight their limitations in exploring the relationships between the different forms of capital. It then draws on qualitative reflections on the author's recent role as manager of a community centre attached to a Christian church building in a city in the north of England. In delivering a 'diaconal' programme of social care and community service activities reaching homeless and elderly people, the centre relied heavily on volunteers from the local community beyond the committed faithful members of the local church. Volunteers ranged from those whose motivations were religious or largely altruistic to those with instrumental motives and those whose unpaid labour was to some extent coerced by statutory agencies. Not only does this stretch the definition of the term 'volunteering', but it also raises some ethical and theological issues for a church espousing Christian values of justice, truth and human dignity while seeking to operate in the secular space of the public sphere.

Seeing religion with new eyes at the asian civilisations museum

ABSTRACTIn Asia and even in cosmopolitan Singapore, religion still plays a major role in national affairs as well as in the everyday lives of many ordinary people. Singapore is a secular state with a multifaith and multi-ethnic showcase. The plurality of cultures, religions, races, and origins still has a significant impact on state matters such as the school curriculum, citizenship education, and preservation of traditional cultures. Museum educators need to understand the opportunities and challenges diversity creates so that our collection and programs may be rendered relevant and meaningful to our visitors. Continual experimentation and responsive improvisation raised many questions and offered numerous possibilities for our museum educators to help visitors see religion with new eyes, not as exclusive sets of beliefs but an ecosystem of diverse ideas bound by rich civilizations that are connected by centuries of trade and cultural exchange. The Asian Civilisations Museum is the first museum in the region to present a broad yet integrated perspective of Asian cultures and civilizations. Can this museum really help people in our society, especially students; discover “selves” and “others“? Is it necessary to introduce new ways of looking at religion? Is impactful learning about various religions possible in a secular space?

Lennard J Davis, Obsession: a history, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 290, £14.50, $27.50 (hardback 978-0-226-13782-7).

Lennard J Davis, Obsession: a history, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 290, £14.50, $27.50 (hardback 978-0-226-13782-7).

Carlos Alonso’s Anatomy Lesson

Since the 1960s Carlos Alonso (b 1930, Tucunán, Argentina) has been committed to the practice of a figurative art charged with sociopolitical content. Beginning in 1969 and ending in 1995, he produced six works that depict the death of revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (1928–1967). Unlike other images of the dead Guevara, which depict his corpse in a Christ‐like fashion and emphasise a religious aura, Alonso frames the execution within the convention of an anatomy lesson, thereby returning his subject to a secular space. In the six works Guevara’s body becomes the contested space of failed and betrayed revolutions in Latin America, as well as an arena where Alonso stubbornly defends painting as a place of memory that saves ‘the wounds of reality’.

SAVING THE “SECULAR”: The Public Vocation of Moral Theology1

ABSTRACTThe London suicide bombings of July 7, 2005 were partly the revolt of moral earnestness against a liberal society that, enchanted by the fantasy of rationalist anthropology, surrenders its passionate members to a degrading consumerism. The “humane” liberalism variously espoused by Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls, and Jeffrey Stout offers a dignifying alternative; but it is fragile, and each of its proponents looks for allies among certain kinds of religious believer. Stanley Hauerwas, however, counsels Christians against cooperation. On the one hand, he is right to resist, insofar as liberalism illiberally excludes theology from public discourse. On the other hand, not all humane liberalism does this: Stout's, for example, is genuinely polyglot, requiring not a common secularist language but a common ethic of communicating. Such a liberal ethic and its attendant anthropology merit the support of Christians: there may be more to be said about the Kingdom of God than respect, tolerance, and fairness, but there will not be less. The Christian has good theological reasons to expect some concord with other inhabitants of secular space. Ethical distinctiveness is no measure of theological integrity; and neither theology (pace Barth) nor biblical narrative (pace Richard Hays) should be expected to do all of the ethical running. If Christians are to be thorough in their moral theology and intelligible in their public statements, then they must borrow non‐theological material, formulate abstract concepts, and engage in casuistical analysis. Nevertheless, if an anxious insistence on distinctiveness is a mistake, concern for theological integrity is not. When the moral theologian borrows ethical material from elsewhere, he should integrate it into a theological vision structured by the Christian salvation‐historical narrative, which will sometimes modify the meaning of what is incorporated. So in affirming humane, polyglot liberalism, the moral theologian will at the same time make salutary qualifications. One of these is the assertion of the need of liberal institutions to own and promote their moral and anthropological commitments. In such a confessionally liberal society, universities in general, and the Arts and Humanities in particular, would recover their vocation to form citizens in communicative virtues and to offer them a dignifying, morally serious vision of human being that could save future generations from a degrading consumerism on the one hand and violent over‐reaction on the other.

Questions de pratiquants et réponses d’imam en contexte français

This study focuses an ethnographic lens on how young French Muslims, locally and interactively among peer groups, interact with local religious authorities in constructing their religious practices. The context is a reappraisal of Islamic law by Imam Tareq Oubrou, mufti of the mosque in Bordeaux. In this study we isolated a particular moment in the religious dialogue between the imam and the faithful, the so-called “legal consultation” which follows the sermon during Friday evening prayers (the khotba during salat el jomou’a) in order to better understand the imam’s role in constructing youthful religious identities. Five sessions dealing with religious dogma as well as with family and professional matters confronting these young practitioners were recorded, transcribed and analysed. What questions do these young people submit to the imam? How does the imam’s legal advice account for the secular space in which he practices his faith? To the extent that it can be measured, what is the impact of the fatwa pronounced by the imam on the life of the supplicant? This study is the outcome of an innovative theologico-canonical approach which emerges over the course of the study.

From Wandering to Wat: Creating a Thai Temple and Inventing New Space in the United States

Buddhism is one of the fastest growing religions in the United States. The estimated number of Americans who practice Buddhism ranges from 2.5 to 4 million and the number is rising. Hundreds of Theravada Buddhist wats [temples] have been built by immigrants and refugees from mainland Southeast Asia since the late 1960s. Often, old churches or residences have been converted into temples to meet immediate needs for space to practice Buddhism collectively. Because the task is so demanding, requiring local and international connections, political clout, as well as substantial economic power, few temples have been constructed in the distinctive Buddhist architectural style. More important, tension—between different cultural logics in terms of conceptualizing space and clashes between sacred and secular space—make it a much more complicated process to build a temple in a predominantly Christian society such as the United States than in Buddhist societies such as Cambodia, Laos, or Thailand. We know little about...

American Sanctuary, Understanding Sacred Spaces (review)

American Sanctuary, Understanding Sacred Spaces. Edited by Louis P. Nelson. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 280. $65.00 hardbound; $24.95 paperback.) This fascinating collection of essays seeks bravely to redefine the study of American sacred Its articles consciously foreground the multifarious, tracking the most varied of sacral allusions in this country's contemporary environment. Collectively they illustrate how sacred space, while perhaps undergoing an atomization due to our nation's increasingly diverse character, has far from lost its relevance to the average citizen. The case studies are broadening and often riveting. As the volume argues, American sacred practices have expanded well beyond traditional places of worship and institutionally sanctioned ritual. Thus our analytical techniques must cast a wide net as well. The editor shapes this volume around the everyday beliefs and practices of the laity, seeking to expand beyond typical definitions of the sacred such as Eliade's ontological marking of a center or the Platonic Tradition's conflation of beauty with the holy. The volume explores numerous examples that under those definitions might be considered too lightly inscribed, too sociopolitical, too unstable, or too contested to qualify traditionally as sacred space. Most intriguing about this volume is its focus on sacred space, in contrast to a more typical focus on sacred buildings. Several of the volume's most fascinating essays explore how various religious markers have been used to delimit and identify sacred precincts with little or no dependence upon, or reference to, the design of an all-encompassing, physically built surround. The Hebrew traditions of the eruv (amalgamating many dweUings into a single communal domain for ritual purposes) and the mezuzah (an exterior doorpost scroU indicating Jewish observance within the home) show communities or families subtly tracing sacred lines or gateways within otherwise undifferentiated, secular space. Contemporary expressions are contrasted with historical cases, showing how modern life can simultaneously empower and erode such non-brick-and-mortar devices. Other articles explore evocations of the sacred in wide-open spaces such as in New York's Central Park, traditionally African-American yard show displays, and cemeteries. An essay on our National Mail in Washington explores how memorials interweave the sacred with messages of politics and power and thus sociaily energize vast surrounding spaces in unstable but nonetheless potent ways. The breadth of faiths studied is another strength. …

Sacred to secular, east to west: the Renaissance study and strategies of display

Perhaps no other space in the domestic interior embodied and articulated the values of Renaissance culture quite like the study. As a space reserved for the use of just one person, the study and the objects it contained allowed its owner to fashion and display an image of his ideal self. This paper examines how scholarly identity was constructed through the choice and display of objects in private studies. Focusing on Oriental carpets and other rare objects, it demonstrates how the decorative strategies of the study derive from sacred contexts and reveals how the transition from sacred to secular space informed and was in turn informed by conceptions of the scholarly self.

Enough is Enough! Civil Unions, Religious Prejudice, and the Limits of Secular Tolerance

This article delineates the broad philosophical/theological legacy that structures the contemporary impasse between conservative religious morality and secular liberal tolerance. In the first part of the article, I will trace how, through a series of innovations stretching from Augustine to Locke, secular space emerged as autonomous and demarcated from religion, and how, concomitantly, religion became understood as ‘personal conviction’ or ‘private belief’.
 
 In the second part, I will take the case study of the 2004 civil unions protests in New Zealand. Using this case study I will argue that this broader ontological legacy (or the inherited way of understanding religion, secular space, and their relation) structures the conflict between religious conservatives and secular liberals so as to prevent these two positions from engaging or recognis¬ing each other. Finally, I shall propose a solution of sorts by looking at what a more Augustinian understanding of religion and politics might allow.