Prof Simon Coleman | Lecture 3 ‘Religious Real Estate: Properties of the Sacred’
Lecture Three

‘Religious Real Estate: Properties of the Sacred’

[Wednesday 15 May, from 5:15 to 6:45 pm, Harris Lecture Theatre, Oriel College]

A persistent image of pilgrimage sites is that they act as ‘spiritual magnets,’ drawing others to them as a result of extraordinary events or miraculous properties of healing or revelation. This view occludes the significance of the multiple material infrastructures that facilitate access to and through a holy place, providing the bodily presences necessary to reinforce its image as locus of exceptional sacrality. In this lecture, I examine the affordances of resources that range from roads to real estate, and I highlight a category of person often ignored in studies of pilgrimage sites: those people—including but not just clergy—who regard sacred destination as ‘home’. I show how domesticity and the divine may become conjoined through miraculous narratives of acquiring and developing property. My focus on the materialities of both cathedrals and Walsingham as sacred places incorporates kitchens and cartographies, personal biographies as well as a wider biopolitics of religious encompassment. Drawing on anthropological work on hospitality and migration, I develop a model of the pilgrimage site as both generator and receiver of ‘vital signs’ of religious presence.
Date: 15 May 2024, 17:15 (Wednesday, 4th week, Trinity 2024)
Venue: Oriel College, Oriel Square OX1 4EW
Venue Details: Harris Lecture Theatre, Oriel College
Speaker: Prof Simon Coleman (University of Toronto)
Organising department: Faculty of Theology and Religion
Part of: Wilde Lectures in Natural and Comparative Religion - Religion Refracted and in Motion: On Pilgrimage in Present Times
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editor: Claire MacLeod