Holy Ground
Re-inventing Ritual Space in Modern Western Culture
edited by P. Post and A.L. Molendijk
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 memoire 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 Andre 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.
- Edited by AL Molendijk
- Edited by P Post
Other Titles in this Series
Worship in the Network Culture
Liturgical Ritual Studies. Fields and Methods, Concepts and Metaphors
Volume 28
Patterns and Persons
A Historiography of Liturgical Studies in the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century
Volume 25
Bonding in Worship
A Ritual Lens on Social Capital in African Independent Churches in South Africa
Volume 30
The Sound of Worship
Liturgical Performance by Surinamese Lutherans and Ghanaian Methodists in Amsterdam
Volume 26
From Fast to Feast
A Ritual-Liturgical Exploration of Reconciliation in South African Cultural Contexts
Volume 19
The Presanctified Liturgy in the Byzantine Rite
A Comparative Analysis of its Origins, Evolution, and Structural Components
Volume 21
Rituals in Abundance
Critical Reflections on the Place, Form and Identity of Christian Ritual in our Culture
Volume 17
Doing Ritual Criticism in a Network Society
Online and Offline Explorations into Pilgrimage and Sacred Place
Volume 29
Friedlicher Kreuzzug und fromme Pilger
Liturgiehistorische Studien zur Heilig-Land-Wallfahrt im Spiegel deutschsprachiger Pilgerberichte des späten 19. Jahrhunderts
Volume 27
The Embodied Space of Worship
Liturgical Signs and Liturgical Bodies in Contemporary Finnish Orthodox Lay Worship
Volume 33
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