Bože! A Grace Catholic Project
Devotion: Shrines and Pilgrimage
Are You Offended By Art Collectors?
The other day Menachem Wecker tweeted a fun question: question for my Catholic friends… would u be offended if non-Catholic collected rosaries (as religious art)? First – in playing with this question – lets put it into an Eastern rite Indie setting and replace rosary with chjotki. I think it is a similar swap – [...]
What Makes “Sacred Space”?
I watched this vid from Religion & Ethics News Weekly this morning and it reminded me of the work I did when studying at Oxford on the features and functions of “Sacred Space”. What constitutes “Sacred Space” will vary from one person to the next – from one group to the next – I realised [...]
Saints? Why Bother?
This piece from the Guardian Belief section is rather timely given my recent experiment in posting the saint for the day – sometimes with a touch of irony, sometimes with a few related ideas. Remembering back to my childhood, listening to older OC relatives talking about (Marian) devotional practice in particular taking pains to point [...]
The Writing on the Wall
This is the door full of love, and within it is love. Enter, sinner, pray [much] for love from your Lord, full of love. For centuries pilgrims (Pagan and Christian) have left their mark on shrines and holy places – grafitti is just one method. Today we think of it as a marring, a desecration [...]
Playing With "Devotion"
Jas Elsner points out that in the late antique period people engaged in devotional and cult activity without necessarily concerning themselves with the fine points of belief or dogma. Right now I’m working on an edit of a section of my PhD thesis exploring issues of early Marian cult and devotion. One of the more [...]
Thinking About: Shrines & Pilgrimage
Living in Europe you can’t stumble for falling into a church, and many contain the shrines and relics of the saints. When I lived in the States there were a few shrines but these were scattered far and wide and you had often had to plan well in advance to see them. This past month [...]