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Sacred Scapes - The City and Beyond - Period 4
Honors Program Program
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Dates: late Jan 2026 - late Jun 2026
Sacred Scapes - The City and Beyond - Period 4
OVERVIEW
CEA CAPA Partner Institution: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Primary Subject Area: Religious Studies
Other Subject Area: Anthropology
Instruction in: English
Transcript Source: Partner Institution
Course Details: Level 400
Recommended Semester Credits: 3
Contact Hours: 84
DESCRIPTION
Sacred Scapes is an interdisciplinary Honors course with collaboration from religious studies, theology, and cultural anthropology. The related VU research profile is Connected Worlds. The course is an interdisciplinary exploration of space and spatiality in religion, with a special focus on contemporary urban contexts. Students will learn how religious worlds are constructed in relation to space, in other words, to understand what the meaning of space is in various contemporary religious contexts.
What does a church service in a downtown club look like? What is the role of religion in urban hipster halal restaurants? And what is the sacredness of places of remembrance of a Dutch popular singer? These and many other questions regarding space, place and sacred will feature in this course.
Space and place are indispensable dimensions of lived religion, as they are tied to the ways in which people encounter the sacred. This course explores how people have transformed space into sacred places in cities and beyond. This involves a rich diversity of religious place-making but also secular practices of sacralization, such as sites of remembrance. Our focus is on the urban situation; although these processes do not exclusively take place in cities, they can be observed most explicitly and outspoken in an urban context.
In this course we invite students to look at sacred spaces by asking how they become sacred and how the sacred is made present, experienced and contested in and through them. As material modes of expression, sacred spaces ?mediate? what people worship, cherish, or contemplate. This brings us to the question of how people perceive spaces: as symbols, places of belonging or a room for evocation and the miraculous.
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam) awards credits based on the ECTS system. Contact hours listed under a course description may vary due to the combination of lecture-based and independent work required for each course therefore, CEA?s recommended credits are based on the ECTS credits assigned by VU Amsterdam. 1 ECTS equals 28 contact hours assigned by VU Amsterdam.
This is an Honors course.
What does a church service in a downtown club look like? What is the role of religion in urban hipster halal restaurants? And what is the sacredness of places of remembrance of a Dutch popular singer? These and many other questions regarding space, place and sacred will feature in this course.
Space and place are indispensable dimensions of lived religion, as they are tied to the ways in which people encounter the sacred. This course explores how people have transformed space into sacred places in cities and beyond. This involves a rich diversity of religious place-making but also secular practices of sacralization, such as sites of remembrance. Our focus is on the urban situation; although these processes do not exclusively take place in cities, they can be observed most explicitly and outspoken in an urban context.
In this course we invite students to look at sacred spaces by asking how they become sacred and how the sacred is made present, experienced and contested in and through them. As material modes of expression, sacred spaces ?mediate? what people worship, cherish, or contemplate. This brings us to the question of how people perceive spaces: as symbols, places of belonging or a room for evocation and the miraculous.
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam) awards credits based on the ECTS system. Contact hours listed under a course description may vary due to the combination of lecture-based and independent work required for each course therefore, CEA?s recommended credits are based on the ECTS credits assigned by VU Amsterdam. 1 ECTS equals 28 contact hours assigned by VU Amsterdam.
This is an Honors course.