Buildings and Bibles Between Profanization and Sacralization: Semiotic Ambivalence in the Protestant Dutch Bible Belt

Based on an ethnographic case study of three recently erected church buildings in the Dutch Bible Belt, this article demonstrates how orthodox Reformed congregations in the Netherlands define church buildings—especially the auditoria—and bibles as simultaneously profane and mediating the sacred. These at first glance ambivalent discourses are informed by a particular semiotic ideology, which maintains that material spaces and objects like these are sacralized if, and only if, individual believers can meaningfully relate them to their personal spiritual experiences. This ideology makes a primary attitude of profanization of material forms indispensable, because any preexistent sacredness of matter would precisely rule out these personal spiritual experiences.     

Individualism and Christianity.

Comments on E. Sampson's (see record 2001-16333-002) linking individualism and collectivism to religious origins. The author comments on Sampson's overgeneralization of Protestant individualism to all branches of Christianity, and describes similarities between Roman Catholicism and rabbinic Judaism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

公元11～17世纪欧洲基督教教堂空间嬗变研究

公元11～17世纪,欧洲的基督教从中世纪的极盛时期逐渐走向世俗化,整个社会文化亦渐渐退去了中世纪经验主义与神秘主义,走向对理性精神的推崇.教堂建筑随之经历了相应的变化：从哥特式教堂走向推崇理性主义的文艺复兴时期的教堂和追求感官猎奇的巴洛克教堂,同时也出现了体现新教理念的教堂建筑.这一时期是欧洲传统基督教教堂建筑发展的重要时期,这一时期建造的大量教堂都成为人类文明史上的宝贵财富.     

广州基督教新教教堂建筑考察与调研

基督教新教是从天主教分离出来的一个教派，其建筑特色也和天主教有诸多区别，新教传入中国后在广州得到一定发展，广州的新教教堂建筑形式多样，不再囿于传统天主教的十字型平面和其他传统手法。而有了本地地方特色。     

Rearranging Things: How Protestant attitudes shake the objects in the piety of Eastern Christian Women

This article considers the objects in the piety of Lebanese women who originally come from Antiochian Orthodox and Maronite traditions and who by marriage join the Protestant Church. Objects that are normally inconspicuous – even “invisible” – in their faith collide with Protestant attitudes and are shaken by dissonant theological concepts. Yet these objects and images retain something of the holy in them and the women hesitate about their total elimination. In this murky situation, things are de-familiarized and yet re-emerge as active, flexible agents with which individual theologies are written and connections are achieved. It explains how the things that furnish the lives of these women are shifted and re-centered rather than destroyed or eliminated.