In his 1954 poem, “Church Going,” Phillip Larkin anticipated the end of religion and ruination Britain’s churches. “What remains,” asked “when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky.” one respect, was right: decline traditional worship in West did produce scores redundant But he also wrong: tendency to view abandoned churches as proof that ultimately “belief must die...

In this essay I propose a hermeneutic model of the higher level understanding during on-line ritual reading by devotees of their respective sacred literatures, using the instruments provided by cognitive sciences. The way a devotee reads a sacred text differs from the way he or she would read a common piece of literature or how a lay person might read the same sacred text. After providing an ov...

Building upon earlier analysis of Eliade’s ‘sacred’ as ‘the intentional object of human experience that is apprehended as the real’ (Rennie 1996, 21) this article pursues the concept of the apprehension of the sacred in empirical experience as described by Eliade in his discussion of religious symbols. Using a variety of visual analogies an attempt is made to understand what Eliade’s understand...

This paper describes the concept, creative process and development decisions regarding an interactive art installation that materializes a point of view on the conflict between the notions of ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ in a particular Portuguese religious festival. The initiative, besides constituting an experiment on the usage of a physical pendulum as control method, aimed to combine three main d...