Religion: Memory and Innovation

The current issue of Approaching Religion is based on a summer school and conference arranged in Åbo/Turku, Finland, in June 2023, on the theme of “Religion: Memory and Innovation”. The event was organized jointly by the Polin Institute for Theological…

The Kalevala and Finland’s Atlantean Past

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…

Mapping the Memories of “Living on Light”

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…

“My soul must live with the colour”

The article focuses on the transformative potential of colours described by Rudolf Steiner. Steiner’s colour definitions are approached through the aesthetics of religion, investigating religion as a sensory and mediated practice. The goal is to clarif…

Contexts of Altar Flowers

Flowers are placed on the altar in many Christian churches. However, while many other items on the altar have given rise to a vast body of theological research, this is not the case with altar flowers. In this article the author makes a constructive co…

Suppressed, Adopted and Invented Memories

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…

The Retrieved Altar Cross of the Luther Church Helsinki

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…