Author: Irene Stengs

Simon Peter undergoes a considerable development from his first introduction in the Gospel of Mark to later narratives, where he gains remarkable miraculous abilities. In Mark, he witnesses Jesus performing numerous miracles without himself being named…

The topic of this article is religious materiality in a Finnish, Lutheran setting. Reflecting on the altar cross of the Luther Church Helsinki – and more specifically the elevated role the cross played in the re-opening of the church in 2016 – the arti…

The Gospel of John reflects several layers of social memory and theological creativity concerning Jesus’s death. In the early material, there seems to be a suppressed awareness of Jesus’s fate and an unwillingness to unfold it in narrative form – somet…

In this article a case study of the phenomenon of “living on light” is presented. The interlocutor “Eva” shares her memories from the period when she did not eat material food. Actor-network theory (ANT) is adopted to analyse the interview. This method…

Nationalistic interpretations of history were prevalent in Finland until the Second World War. A unifying past for Finns was sought in antiquity, often influenced by interpretations of the Kalevala, regarded as the Finnish national epic. The Kalevala a…

Mindfulness has gained increasing popularity across Western societies over the past couple of decades, although mainly in forms that have been stripped of all religious content. During this period, the practice has also attracted the interest of mainst…

This article investigates the notion of spiritual appropriation in Finnish schools, with a particular focus on the experiences of religious minorities. It draws on narratives from these communities, shedding light on their daily experiences in the educ…

Moluccan people arrived in the Netherlands in 1951, as a result of the complicated process of the decolonization of Indonesia. A situation of permanent waiting and political disappointment resulted in this growing Moluccan community remaining. The Molu…

This study examines the appropriation of religious symbols by the Nordic Alt-Right over the last decade, focusing on their use for völkisch identity construction around whiteness. It locates this signification historically, both before and during the T…

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 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…

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…