Introduction: Emotional Entanglements of Sacrality and Secularity—Engaging the Paradox

Abstract

How, in various places across the world, do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled? In exploring this theme, this book focuses on such diverse topics as the dynamic roles of Carnaval in Brazil, the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria and the culturalization of secular tolerance in the Netherlands. What binds the chapters in this volume is the focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are

A psalm is always a memory: Nostalgia and sacrality in contemporary ritual-musical appropriations of the psalms

“…Sacrality is a quality of valuation processes, whether in a religious context or somewhere else (Wijnia, 2016: 32–33). We qualify certain meanings or personal values in our data as ‘sacred’ if these appear to be non-ordinary or exceptional, indeed ‘set apart’ for participants (Balkenhol et al, 2020: 4–8; Evans, 2003: 35–36). In the nostalgic reflections which participants employ as a motivation for their active remembering or forgetting, we understand those topics which are ‘set apart’ to consist of all convictions which form fundamental, non-negotiable values for the participants (Anttonen, 2000: 280–281; Wijnia, 2016: 38, 42).…”

“…Sacrality denotes a ‘marker of ultimate, nonnegotiable value used as sense-making strategy that relates perceptions of ordinary and non-ordinary character’, and is not limited to religious or secular settings (Wijnia, 2016: 42; cf. Balkenhol et al, 2020: 2). When tracing the sacred in processes of meaning-making, differences between the ordinary and the ‘set-apart’ come to the fore; that is, differences between people’s highest ideals and indifferences, between their most-remarkable experiences and everyday routine (cf.…”

“…When tracing the sacred in processes of meaning-making, differences between the ordinary and the ‘set-apart’ come to the fore; that is, differences between people’s highest ideals and indifferences, between their most-remarkable experiences and everyday routine (cf. Balkenhol et al, 2020: 4–8).…”

“…5 Locally engaged research is required to be able to offer a fine-grained understanding of the place of religion-rooted rituality in public space, and its meaning for the individuals involved (cf. Balkenhol et al, 2020: 7–8, 14–15; Klomp, 2020: 144; Meyer, 2019: 65, 79–82). Thus, we must pay heed that the mechanics of individual memory are not conflated or equated with collective memory, and to homogenise the meaning-making of individuals in the three cases that we study (cf.…”

Secularisation as the fragmentation of the sacred and of sacred space

“…Meanwhile, 'the secular' is often contrasted with 'the sacred', which may be equated with a particular form of religiosity, namely that of Latin Christianity. Now this picture has been challenged by the twenty-first century 'return of religion', but also by post-secular formations of the sacred which are no longer intrinsically attached to Christianity, and perhaps even to religion as such (Balkenhol, van den Hemel, and Stengs 2020). This is evident in contemporary forms of nationalism and populism, some of which draw explicitly on Christian symbolism while others do not (Brubaker 2012;Gorski and Perry 2022;van der Tol and Rowley 2021).…”