Religion Under Fire

Citation

Jasper A, Hass A, Saade B, Darroch F & Gao Z (2019) Religion Under Fire. The Critical Religion Association - Critical Approaches to the Study of Religion [Website content] 05.05.2019.

Abstract
First paragraph: The fragility of religion was all too evident the night of conflagration in Paris. That fragility was first and most spectacularly seen in its material form. For however we may choose to define religion, it is bound inextricably with the physical, the tangible, the sensate. And so it is susceptible to devastation as much as to decay. We may be able to fight against the decay – and the restoration project of Notre-Dame would have been perpetual – but devastation can strike any time, whether by human hands or by an act of God. As the flames ascended the wooden beams of the cathedral’s spire, onlookers watched as the materiality of religion was brought palpably home, brought flagrantly to the ground. What might have happened had the flames reached, and consumed, the famous relic of the Crown of Thorns? Here Good Friday would have come four days early. Black Friday would have become Black Monday, as the ashes floated skyward, and the charred remains were swept into the bin. Religion, so often perceived to rest upon immutable truths, was here all too transient.