Is appropriation a useful category for scholarship on religion?
Concluding remarks for the special issue of Approaching Religion, ‘Appropriation as a Perspective and Topic in the Study of Religion and Spirituality’.
Author: Irene Stengs
Religious heritage and change in the North
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…
Wind of change
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…
Religious heritage in the North
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…
From church to museum and back again
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…
When Magnus Johanson turned fifty
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 Reformation and the university church in Leipzig
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…
From ignis mundi to the world’s first oil-tanker
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…
Heritigization and foreign diplomacy
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 making of religious heritage
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…