Jorien Holsappel-Brons

This is a photo of the entrance of the meditation Centre of Schiphol Airport (Amsterdam). It shows the ‘reading room’ with two lounge chairs and a bookcase containing reading material on a range of subjects related to religion and spirituality. When you enter this room, at your left hand there is a door to a conversation room where travellers can talk to a pastor. Behind the glass wall with the kneeling figure, you enter the quiet room for individual prayer, meditation and reflection. 

 

Such ‘quiet rooms’ or ‘rooms of silence’ can also be found in other public institutions like in health care, education, churches and shopping malls, and they are the subject of the PhD research I started in january 2006. This research is part of a project in which scholars from Tilburg University and the University of Groningen participate. The programme is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for scientific Research in the context of a wider programme, which stimulates research into ‘The future of the religious past’.

 

Title of the project is Holy Ground: reinventing ritual space in modern Western Culture. Proceeding from the central focus on ritual in its spatial dimension, it analyses forms of new ritual space and ritual repertiore in mutual connection, and will interpret them in relation to processes of changing (religious) dynamic, such as individualisation, ‘emotionalisation’, deinstitutionalistation and (de-/re-) sacralisation. Thus, the programme wants to describe and analyze the dynamics of modern ritual spaces, both in a synthesizing way, as by two case studies. My research on rooms of silence is one of these cases (supervisors prof. dr. A.L. Molendijk and dr. J.E.A. Kroesen, the other case concerns memorial space (especially the Wilhelmina Cancer Forest) and is studied by Judith Tonnaer, PhD in Tilburg (supervisor prof. dr. P.G.J. Post). 

This page was meant to give an impression of some themes and a part of the empirical material of this research.  

For detailed information about Jorien Holsappel-Brons and the project see her personal page (in Dutch)