A sweet six year-old girl at Corinth Baptist Church, in Albertville, Alabama, tells the story of Jonah, demonstrating the power of narrative in the hands of a gifted storyteller:
Monday, December 13, 2010
Thursday, December 9, 2010
spatial non-homogeneity in eight cities
Religious people adhere to the concept of spatial non-homogeneity: secular space (and time) is interrupted by sacred space, marked off and sanctified. Spiritual groups construct architecture, landscape and interiors to constitute a kind of spiritual identity, to evoke identification and orientation. It is not common to think of this phenomenon as rhetoric, but what could be more rhetorical than providing an embodied experience with time and space in order to create a kind of soul?
PBS, in cooperation with Sacred Space International, has created self-guided tours of eight U.S. cities and their sacred spaces. You can be a sacred space tourist! How does that work, exactly? Is sacred space still sacred if you don't consider it sacred yourself---when the symbols and the order and the altars and visual culture don't speak to you as it does to adherents of that faith, when that space is a space like any other, when the threshold isn't really a threshold?
Though the pull of sacred space is limited in the experience of the nonbeliever, I think it's still there. When I visited Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock, the 2nd most sacred place in all the world for Muslims, in 1998, I was completely floored at the transcendent feeling I got, a feeling I believe was engineered for Muslims by 7th century Muslim architects. Could it be argued that with the rhetoric of sacred space, identification is not necessary for the experience of the sacred?
PBS, in cooperation with Sacred Space International, has created self-guided tours of eight U.S. cities and their sacred spaces. You can be a sacred space tourist! How does that work, exactly? Is sacred space still sacred if you don't consider it sacred yourself---when the symbols and the order and the altars and visual culture don't speak to you as it does to adherents of that faith, when that space is a space like any other, when the threshold isn't really a threshold?
Though the pull of sacred space is limited in the experience of the nonbeliever, I think it's still there. When I visited Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock, the 2nd most sacred place in all the world for Muslims, in 1998, I was completely floored at the transcendent feeling I got, a feeling I believe was engineered for Muslims by 7th century Muslim architects. Could it be argued that with the rhetoric of sacred space, identification is not necessary for the experience of the sacred?
Peyotists and syncretism
One of my students directed me to the Peyote Way Church of God, a "peyotist" group under the umbrella of the Native American Church. Their spiritual leader, Rev. Immanuel Pardeahtan Trujillo died this summer in Willcox, Arizona.
What caught my student's attention about this church is their statement of doctrine: they cite Joseph Smith's revelation on health as a source of inspiration. Elsewhere in their history, written by Vin Supyrnowicz, journalist for the Las Vegas Review Journal, we learn that the Peyote Way Church of God looked to Smith for inspiration not only for their sacrament of peyote but for their stance on continuing revelation outside the Christian canon.
The syncretism here is fascinating. An intimate group of believers---with roots going back to the Ghost Dance, the Native American Church, and, oddly, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints---appeal to the first amendment's free exercise clause using Indian tradition, new age healing, Protestant Christianity, and Joseph Smith's revelations. What could be more American!
What caught my student's attention about this church is their statement of doctrine: they cite Joseph Smith's revelation on health as a source of inspiration. Elsewhere in their history, written by Vin Supyrnowicz, journalist for the Las Vegas Review Journal, we learn that the Peyote Way Church of God looked to Smith for inspiration not only for their sacrament of peyote but for their stance on continuing revelation outside the Christian canon.
The syncretism here is fascinating. An intimate group of believers---with roots going back to the Ghost Dance, the Native American Church, and, oddly, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints---appeal to the first amendment's free exercise clause using Indian tradition, new age healing, Protestant Christianity, and Joseph Smith's revelations. What could be more American!
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