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Three general reconfigurations of sacred space — sometimes interlocking, sometimes in tension — emerge from the new style and sensibilities of contemporary global Hindu temples with implications for the general history of religions. The first is the emergence of a new sense of the sacred sphere, of temple space within an urban environment dominated by the ownership of houses and not land or even natural phenomenon. Second, even the architecture of both space and the polity of new temples reflects democratic models of civic organizations, which leads to new space for lectures and education. Third, complex middle-class religious sensibilities emerge within the temples, which affect the style and polity of the temple and even the faces of the deities, often creating a new visual theology. How will these living sacred spaces of the temple matter for historians of religions? Will this kind of public, and in many ways empirical, sacrality once again challenge the field to reconsider material sacrality?

The principal focus of this chapter is the creation in 1906 of the Bezalel art school and museum. In its organizational structure as in the content of its art, Bezalel reflected the growing centrality of Palestine for Zionism and the increasing bond between Palestine and the Hebrew language. Bezalel would quickly emerge as an icon and a center of Hebrew culture. Its founder, Boris Schatz, conceived of Bezalel as a national temple and of art as the basis for a new Torah—highlighting the struggle to forge a transformed sense of sacred and profane that informed many Zionist undertakings. The Palestine office, established in 1908 and headed by Arthur Ruppin, became not only a further marker of Palestine's new prominence in Zionist thinking and praxis but also the fulcrum of a close alliance and eventually a near identity of interests between the Zionist Organization and the Yishuv.

The basic categories of analysis (spatial dynamics, centering focus, aesthetic impact, and symbolic resonance) and the traditions of church-building (classic sacramental churches, classic evangelical churches, and modern communal churches) are explained here. The first main argument of the book is that classic sacramental churches have the density of poetry and thus require interpretation, while the other traditions have the familiarity of prose and are more easily understood. The second main argument is that sacrality may be grounded not in separation (from the profane) but rather in association (with the narratives and experiences most significant to a religious tradition).

A church that is rich in symbolic associations conveys a strong sense of sacrality—the presence of the holy within the sacred. Different forms of symbolic association in the classic sacramental tradition are discussed in connection with Santa Maria Novella at Florence. Orientation (planning a church with the altar at the east end), legends of foundation, and ceremonies of consecration are all seen as ways of cultivating symbolic resonance. The “Cathedral of Huts” at Maciene in Mozambique is seen as one example of how churches reflect a process of indigenization in Africa.

Beginning in the years after World War II, church building in much of the Christian world experienced a reaction against various perceived abuses: extravagance, use of revival styles, use of distinctively ecclesiastical forms, a spirit of withdrawal from the world, ornamentalism, and monumentalism. But toward the end of the twentieth century a traditionalist countermovement arose, insisting that traditional forms were important in design of churches to inspire a sense of the sacred, to maintain linkage with the heritage of particular religious communities, and as a hedge against banality. Voices for reform of church design appealed also for fuller congregational participation in worship (a theme in the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council), but traditionalists have questioned whether the reforms carried out have actually led to greater participation. The rise of the multi-use or multi-purpose church also sparked a controversy over sacrality: use of a church for purposes other than worship seemed to many a violation of sacred space, although reformers had shown that segregation of sacred space from secular use is a relatively recent phenomenon. On all these points, the book argues against dogmatic positions and suggests a distinction between dogmatism and orthodoxy (which it takes to be opposites).

This chapter focuses on the missionaries orchestrating a religious revival in these years which also used their public spectacles to reassert the legitimacy of the Bourbon monarchy; however, their approach could not have been more different from that of the regime. It notes that in their four– eight-week-long revivals, culminating in processions which were truly the mass spectacles of the Restoration, the missionaries worked day and night to reconvert the population into practicing Catholics. It demonstrates how these clergymen directly transposed the struggles of the revolutionary era to the Restoration, and sets the stage for understanding how and why it was during the Restoration that “the transferral of sacrality to the secular and liberal principles of the nation” was finally accomplished.

This chapter discusses the relics of saints, their paradoxical play between fragmentation and wholeness, vitality and mortality, sacrality and profanity, and the kinds of memory at work in the display and understanding of these bodily bits, the kinds of temporality thus evoked. Relics, while no longer central to the structure of churches or most habits of worship, retain a persistent fascination. They literalize the body's fragmentation, but they also suggest a peculiar persistence of wholeness. The three experiences of memory evoked here are: historical, communal, and sacred. The chapter argues that each draws other times into a slippery present; each draws fullness of life into a fragment (of time and flesh both), and each unsettles the notions of identity as a tidy individuality.

In a trajectory that leads from man in the state of nature to the emergence of the primitive in the science of anthropology, the generalizations of ethnography have infiltrated the philosophical discourses of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. In a series of complex mimetic gestures and equally complex unsayings, each has appropriated the work of his anthropologically minded predecessors. Levinas identifies the Being of beings with Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's primitive sacrality, thereby unsaying Dasein understood in terms of its originary structure. The implications of anthropological tropes for Levinasian discourse are considerable. His depiction of the primitive points to the Janus face of some motifs in Totality and Infinity, as lying beneath and beyond representation and cognition. The primitive, when identified with the il y a as sensory inundation, replicates the uncontainability and excessiveness of the infinite. More originary than the temporalization of separated being, it repeats the non-time of alterity.

Like commentators under the Old Regime and the first four years of the Revolution, revolutionaries of the Year II characterized terror as a property of the law, deeming it exemplary, restraining, and “salutary.” They also employed a familiar pattern of characterizing terror as a legitimate resource to be directed against “enemies” and even represented themselves as the terror of those enemies, elaborating on a trope that had once been reserved for kings but now belonged to the sovereign nation. Yet they also attached meanings to the word “terror” that were absent during the earlier days of the Revolution. They associated terror with vengeance and even extermination, thereby skipping over their revolutionary forebears and drawing on biblical imagery. Their descriptions of a “holy Mountain” casting thunderbolts at the nation’s foes further presented terror as a sacred, divine force. It also recalled elements of the sublime and associated terror with fresh air and health, much as the medical literature of the Old Regime had sometimes presented terror as beneficial to the human organism. Revolutionaries imagined terrified enemies largely to reassure themselves. The idea that the enemy experienced terror was comforting to revolutionaries who themselves were frightened or even terrified.

Chiang Mai is a city inseparable from its significance as a Buddhist and animist center. Its premodern status as a mandala meant that it, in Theravada Buddhist cosmology, radiated out prosperity to the countryside, even as its neighborhoods were miniature mandalas governed by animist spirit shrines. These discourses parallel present-day ideas about the restorative power of culture. But within its sacred heart, Chiang Mai is crumbling. Broken buildings and the glut of cheap high-rise architecture raise concerns about not only social, but spiritual decline.

The death of the still-young Charles IX in 1574 was greeted by very different responses from the two religious camps. For the Protestants, his lonely and painful end – he was spitting blood! – mirrored his life as a tyrant who perverted royal authority. Catholics viewed him as a worthy monarch who fought to defend the true religion, and who in doing so sacrificed his life for his subjects. They promoted a viewpoint that sacralised him personally beyond most of his predecessors, whose super-sacrality was more institutional than personal. After his death, the Malcontents gained considerable influence, but by 1576 the Estates General of Blois marginalised them and called for the monarchy to defend Catholicism, thus reopening the return of civil war. It also showed the need for a strong (absolutist) monarchy to deal with revolt.

This chapter offers a theoretical exploration of how the production of the cultural value of “serious” literature depends on economies of symbolic capital that run counter to the actual economies of the book market. The singularization of a book or author is not unrelated to the market, the chapter explains, but neither is it related in a straightforward way. Looking at the singular Toni Morrison and at how her novels have been read in the context of Oprah Winfrey’s book club, the chapter proposes that cultural value is best understood as a kind of consecration, a production of sacrality.

The chapter considers the ways that Hawaiians used religion to pursue a central place in the world. Some Hawaiians saw different Christian denominations as organizing principles for competing conceptions of global power, but others deployed Hawaiian story and chant to affirm that sacred power imbued Hawaiian places.

This chapter explores the relationship between the kōlam art ritual and the earth goddess Bhūdevi. One of the main reasons the kōlam is performed is to ask for forgiveness to the earth goddess for trampling on her throughout the day. This chapter analyzes the multiple subtexts in which Hinduism relates to the natural world as sacred. Two new concepts, “embedded ecologies” and “intermittent sacralities,” are introduced to help analyze some of the paradoxes between the deferential attitude toward natural forms and the demanding practicality of everyday life in India. Bhūdevi is examined more closely through the concepts of waste, sin, and pollution in order to understand the dynamic between the Hindu worshipper, the belief in the earth goddess, and the subsequent ecological consequences.