The holy Kaʻbah and the two holy mosques

In the Muslim world, mosques function as places of worship rather than “congregations” or community centers. Muslims pray in any mosque that is convenient, since they are not consi...

The Place of the Mosque: Genealogies of Space, Knowledge, and Power extends Foucault’s analysis, Of Other Spaces, and the “ideological conflicts which underlie the controversies of...

Two views of the nature of holiness are outlined in this chapter. According to one, which we may call ontological or essentialist, holy places, persons, times, and objects are onto...

‘The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ cannot easily be explained in the terms of modern states. Deriving its authority from ancient history, it still upheld the aspiration t...

This chapter examines Black women's Christian performance via contemporary television and the internet to gain insights into how screen audiences are invited to experience the Holy...

This chapter investigates the historiography of the cult of the Holy Tear of Christ, La Sainte Larme, and explores the materiality and affective life of the relic. The apocryphal n...

This chapter focuses on the creation of holy sites in Rome that are comparable in their significance to those in Jerusalem—that is, touched by past sacred events and/or sacred bodi...