Heritage and Church: The theology of places
“Heritage is not just past looking, it is also what challenges our present and perhaps should inspire,” highlighted Alexandre Palma, Associate Professor at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa and Auxiliary Bishop of Lisbon, at the Science Café “Keep the Church in the Village. How to Make Use of Heritage?”, on September 4th.
The discussion centered around Religion and Heritage “one of the cornerstones of this T4EU alliance” as Gregor Taul, art historian and semiotician at the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA), pointed out, joined together experts and students from across Europe both on-site and online.
Hosted by EKA, during the Station Narva festival, this Transform4Europe promoted talk explored a particularly important issue as “Heritage connects with identity, but also, with democracy and the rule of law,” Gregor Taul explained.
Brigitta Davidjants, musicologist and journalist of the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, and Marko Uibu, associate Professor of Social Innovation at the University of Tartu, were also guest speakers at this event meant to define what separates heritage.
“Non-physical memory, this is one ingredient I would put into the pot. Another one I would say is relations. There's a relational bond for individuals and communities towards something,” explained Alexandre Palma.
But Brigitta Davidjants brought another element to this definition, adding the intellectual sphere. “that's something for me that has always been intellectual about shared values, thoughts, artifacts, culture that a group of people share.”
Marko Uibu concluded with the last component: symbolic. “The main dimension there is symbolic.” “It is all about collective meanings and values." And in that sense, it a very social symbolic process.
Regarding the church, Alexandre Palma recalls how “the secularization theory of predicted an inevitable erosion of religion within the public sphere”, with church “gradually losing any relevance.”
But from the theologist’s perspective the opposite happened. “Religion persists and resists.” Rather than disappearing, “it is undergoing a transformation of its forms of presence, of relevance of and of expression.”
For Marko Uibu this is a particularly interesting topic as in Estonia, “famous for being very religiously indifferent or non-religious”, “an institution which doesn't play actually important role in in people's everyday lives has actually, sometimes, ceremonially, or symbolically” role.
“It is interesting to look at these dynamics and obviously, the way how we perceive what is center, what is periphery.” “It is a question of meanings and also of power,” the professor adds.
Alexandre Palma also believes that there is “a risk of assessing religion in our time by old-fashioned criteria” being blind to new forms of religion.
According to the researcher “buildings and heritage and obviously the communities that have produced them and cherished them show there is a certain degree of plasticity” to religion.
Rewatch the full debate here