Worship space acoustics: Design needs, trends, and issues for sacred spaces, relative to traditional and contemporary worship styles

2015 ◽  
Vol 138 (3) ◽  
pp. 1817-1817
Author(s):  
Scott Riedel ◽  
Craig Schaefer
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Worship ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Worship Space ◽  
Worship Styles

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Russian Revolution ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
Soviet Leadership ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Ideology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Experiment

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools—from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. This book presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The book argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. It shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the “sacred spaces” of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. The book explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

Rome’s Loca Sancta

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galit Noga-Banai
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Local Bonding ◽  
The Creation

This chapter focuses on the creation of holy sites in Rome that are comparable in their significance to those in Jerusalem—that is, touched by past sacred events and/or sacred bodies. It maps the reasons for the change of attitude toward Jerusalem in Rome, and makes the argument that once the locally connected holy sites projected into the urban space, especially the local bonding of the sites related to Peter and Paul, it was possible to include Jerusalem in the Roman decorative programs. The discussion concentrates on the dynamic involved in the commemoration of sacred spaces in Rome, from the architecture of the holy sites (Basilica Apostolorum, S. Paolo fuori le mura) to portable objects related to them.

scholarly journals A Maximal Understanding of Sacrifice: Bataille, Richard Wagner, Pilgrimage and the Bayreuth Festival

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Philip Smith ◽  
Florian Stoll
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Mixed Methods Study ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Paradigm Case ◽  
Comparative Sociology ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Classical Work

This paper calls for a broad conception of sacrifice to be developed as a resource for cultural sociology. It argues the term was framed too narrowly in the classical work of Hubert and Mauss. The later approach of Bataille permits a maximal understanding of sacrifice as non-utilitarian expenditures of money, energy, passion and effort directed towards the experience of transcendence. From this perspective, pilgrimage can be understood as a specific modality of sacrificial activity. This paper applies this understanding of sacrifice and pilgrimage to the annual Bayreuth “Wagner” Festival in Germany. Drawing on a multi-year mixed-methods study involving ethnography, semi-structured interviews and historical research, the article traces sacrificial expenditures at the level of individual festival attendees. These include financial costs, arduous travel, dedicated research of the artworks, and disciplines of the body. Some are lucky enough to experience transcendence in the form of deep emotional experience, and a sense of contact with sacred spaces and forces. Our study is intended as an exemplary paradigm case that can be drawn upon analogically by scholars. We suggest that other aspects of social experience, including many that are more ‘everyday’, can be understood through a maximal model of sacrifice and that a rigorous, wider comparative sociology could be developed using this tool.

scholarly journals National, Regional, or Just Catholic?—Dilemmas of Church Art in a German–Polish Borderland. Upper Silesia, 1903–1953

Arts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Jerzy Gorzelik
Keyword(s):  
Imagined Communities ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Sacred Art ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
God's Will ◽  
National Community ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Art Works ◽  
National Ideology ◽  
Church Art

The rise of nationalism threatened the integrity of the Catholic milieu in borderlands such as Prussian Upper Silesia. Facing this challenge, the ecclesiastical elite developed various strategies. This article presents interpretations of sacred art works from the first half of the 20th century, which reveal different approaches to national discourses expressed in iconographic programs. The spectrum of attitudes includes indifference, active counteraction to the progress of nationalism by promoting a different paradigm of building temporal imagined communities, acceptance of nationalistic metaphysics, which assumes the division of humanity into nations endowed with a unique personality, and a synthesis of Catholicism and nationalism, in which national loyalties are considered a Christian duty. The last position proved particularly expansive. Based on the primordialist concept of the nation and the historiosophical concept of Poland as a bulwark of Christianity, the Catholic-national ideology gained popularity among the pro-Polish clergy in the inter-war period. This was reflected in Church art works, which were to present Catholicism as the unchanging essence of the nation and the destiny of the latter resulting from God’s will. This strategy was designed to incorporate Catholic Slavophones into the national community. The adoption of a different concept of the nation by the pro-German priests associated with the Centre Party—with a stronger emphasis on the subjective criteria of national belonging—resulted in greater restraint in expressing national contents in sacred spaces.

scholarly journals “It’s Not Macho, Is It?”: Contemporary British Christian Men’s Constructions of Masculinity

2020 ◽  
pp. 106082652098171
Author(s):  
Line Nyhagen
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Hybrid Form ◽  
Worship Styles

Religion is a key site for constructions of masculinity, and visions of a gender equal society must include religious men. This study examines how a group of British white, heterosexual, middle-class, lay Anglican men construct masculinities via discourses on church-going, worship styles, and godly submission. The interviewed men express a hybrid form of masculinity, informed by religious faith, that embraces typically “feminine” characteristics such as love, humility, and vulnerability. At the same time, they articulate ideals of heteronormativity and essentialized gender differences that support hegemonic masculinity. The participants engage simultaneously in a selective, “discursive distancing” from, and a discursive alignment with, hegemonic masculinity norms, thus revealing tensions between competing masculinity norms.

Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser on Transnational Governance and the Future of Christendom

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 369-411
Author(s):  
Brian C. Lockey
Keyword(s):  
Edmund Spenser ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Transnational Governance ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

This article considers the writings of Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser within the context of European religious conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, amid the perceived Ottoman threat to Christendom. In their fictional works, these authors imagine an overarching authority that might replace the traditional papal power of oversight and deposing in order to regulate temporal sovereigns and foster a unity of Christian princes within Europe. Even as they can be read as reimagining Christendom, their fictional works reflect what Charles Taylor has called the “disenchantment” of sacred spaces within his philosophical history of the emergence of secularity within European cultures.

Paul and Sacred Space

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorunn Økland
Keyword(s):  
Sacred Space ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
House Churches ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Structural ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Paul's Letters ◽  
Analytical Frameworks

This chapter analyses the terms with which Paul of Tarsus designates various sacred spaces—hieron, naos, eidoleion, ekklesia—in conversation with the archaeology of sacred spaces, research on the Pauline house churches, and with the help of theories of space, new materialism, and the sacred. The chapter starts with an introduction of the analytical frameworks and ends with ideas about ‘monumentalization’: that the social-structural relations between people in a sacred space tended to materialize over time into purpose-built buildings—hence the double meanings of synagogue, ekklesia, and hieron as designations both of assemblies and later of the buildings accommodating the respective assemblies. A central argument is that Paul’s letters constitute a special case in the development of the early Christian ekklesia and the parallel development of the synagogue, because in Paul’s time the temple in Jerusalem was still standing and was a self-evident part of his religious universe.

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