Holy Ground: Re-Inventing Ritual Space in Modern Western Culture

1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-90-429-2178-8
Verlag: PEETERS PUB

Buch, Englisch, Band 24, 316 Seiten, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 476 g

Reihe: Liturgia Condenda

In contemporary Western culture ritual spaces are preserved, destructed

and reconstructed. Examples are the rearrangement of churches, the rise of

multi-religious urban ritual spaces, the remarkable vitality of places of

pilgrimage and war cemeteries, and the growing popularity of lieux de

mémoire in general with their accompanying forms of 'topolatry'

and 'geopiety'. This volume - initiated by a Dutch research group -

explores the transformations of ritual space in the modern West from

various angles. The first programmatic part of the book focuses on the

research into the triad of space/place, ritual and religion/sacrality and

the essentially contested notion of the sacred. The next set of

contributions deals with the relations between memorial culture and place.

American 'landscapes of tragedy', memorial sites for the filmmaker and

journalist Theo van Gogh and the popular Dutch singer André Hazes, and the

Cancer Memorial Forest in The Netherlands that commemorates the victims of

this disease, are analysed in some detail. The third part of the book

situates ritual space in the tension between tradition and modernity. The

examples of redundant church buildings and rooms of silence, and

especially the construction of a new Roman Catholic Cathedral in Oakland,

California, show how people construct and re-invent ritual spaces. In the

final part, the vicissitudes of Mormon temple space and the wide-spread

phenomenon of people ritually throwing coins into water are explored from

a cultural-anthropological perspective. The triangle place/space, ritual,

sacrality/religion proves to be crucial in the exploration of the

processes of re-inventing ritual space in modern Western culture. New

forms of memorialization mixed with traditional elements, changing

relationships between private and public, individual and collective,

temporary and permanent dimensions, and the contested character of sacred

spaces all point to a new religious dynamics, characterized by the

processes of individualisation, emotionalisation and

de-institutionalisation.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Post, P.

Molendijk, A.L.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein