Secularisation as the fragmentation of the sacred and of sacred space

Contemporary conflicts about secularity in ‘the West’ tend to focus on public space. Although collective Christian heritage means that public space is rarely exclusively neutral, conflicts continue to arise over the relationship between secularity and religious symbolism, and especially over those s...

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Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs: van der Tol, Marietta (Auteur) ; Gorski, Philip S. 1963- (Auteur)
Type de support: Électronique Article
Langue:Anglais
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Publié: Routledge 2022
Dans: Religion, state & society
Année: 2022, Volume: 50, Numéro: 5, Pages: 495-512
Sujets non-standardisés:B Public Space
B Secularisation
B Time
B Sacred
Accès en ligne: Volltext (kostenfrei)
Description
Résumé:Contemporary conflicts about secularity in ‘the West’ tend to focus on public space. Although collective Christian heritage means that public space is rarely exclusively neutral, conflicts continue to arise over the relationship between secularity and religious symbolism, and especially over those symbols which derive from religious minorities. This contribution critically considers the designation of space as either sacred or secular in political imaginaries, approaching processes of secularisation as part of a fragmentation of the sacred and of sacred space. We introduce the concept of trans-liminal space: spaces which can contain multiple and potentially conflicting ascriptions of meaning. Conceptualising public space as trans-liminal allows for contemporaneous and competing ascriptions of the secular, the sacred, the secular-sacred, the sacred-secular, without being exclusively grounded in either. Trans-liminality does not preclude public space to be predominantly secular, but it does problematise the phenomenon of normative exclusions of religious symbols from public spaces.
ISSN:1465-3974
Contient:Enthalten in: Religion, state & society
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1080/09637494.2022.2144662