Author: Irene Stengs

A new dispute about the ownership of Karelian laments emerged in Finland in 2021. The severely endangered Karelian language is the closest relative of Finnish. Karelian laments were brought into new Finnish contexts during the late twentieth century by…

There is little about globalized modern magical-religious Witchcraft that isn’t borrowed. It is well established that it is a creative response to modernity rather than an ancient continuous practice. Its inventiveness also makes it ripe for charges of…

In this article, based on my doctoral research, I discuss the appropriation of religious elements from South America by Finnish ‘mystical tourists’. The plant medicine ceremonies are approached as spiritual commodities. Imagining local beliefs and prac…

The current issue of Approaching Religion is based on a conference arranged in Åbo/Turku, Finland, in November 2022, with the theme ‘Religious Heritage and Change in the North’. The conference was organized jointly by the research network Religious His…

The value of diaconia is difficult to measure, its immaterial assets not easily grasped. In this article, I contribute to the area in analysing the perspective of 22 deacons on what is most important in their job and what could potentially be of greate…

The article takes as its point of departure the notion that the Scandinavian countries have been dominated by a monocultural Lutheranism. This notion is nuanced by focusing on everyday life and oppositional voices. In the nineteenth century, the Luther…

In the small village of Kinnarumma in western Sweden an old wooden church was replaced by a new church buildning in the early twentieth century. The old church was de-sacralized by being moved to an open-air museum in Borås and used there for exhibitio…

This article examines birthday party decorations as a way of understanding the materiality and religious place-making of an expanding Baptist congregation in central Sweden in the early twentieth century. The fiftieth birthday party for Magnus Johanson…

The purpose of this article is to investigate how memory activists from 2008 onwards used the past in their advocacy work for the restoration of the university church in Leipzig. The Paulinerkirche was built as a Dominican monastery church in the first…

This article analyses mechanisms of heritagisation that transformed oil from a natural to a cultural resource through the case study of the Branobel corporation, which operated in Azerbaijan from the late nineteenth century, and by reflecting on the ro…

The article investigates the complex negotiation process regarding the renovation of St Catherine’s church in St Petersburg. Additionally, the goal is to gain novel understanding of how former religious spaces can be transformed and highlight the vario…

The proliferation of religious heritage seems to flow self-evidently from the processes of de-churching and secularization taking place in many European societies. Although having become redundant or outdated, certain religious buildings, objects or pr…