Sacred Communities: Contestations and Connections

ABSTRACT

This article discusses a project whose purpose was to review existing qualitative and quantitative data from two separate studies to provide new insights about everyday religion and belonging. Researchers engaged in knowledge exchange and dialogue with new and former research participants, with other researchers involved in similar research, and with wider academic networks beyond the core disciplines represented here, principally anthropology and geography. Key concluding themes related to the ambivalent nature of ‘faith’, connections over place and time, and the contested nature of community. Implicit in terms like ‘faith’, ‘community’, and ‘life course’ are larger interwoven narratives of space, time, place, corporeality, and emotion. The authors found that understanding how places, communities, and faiths differ and intersect requires an understanding of social relatedness and boundaries.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Becky Taylor of Birkbeck, University of London, for her role as collaborator and co-author of Ben Rogaly in the Norwich research, for her enthusiastic support for the work leading to this article, and for enabling a meeting between Abby Day and some of the Norwich research participants. We also acknowledge funding for the original research projects from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and for the collaboration leading to this article from the Cross-Council Connected Communities Research Programme, led by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abby Day

Abby Day is Reader in Race, Faith and Culture, Goldsmiths, Lecturer in Anthropology of Religion at the University of Kent, UK, and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Geography, University of Sussex, UK. Her research interests focus on belief, the anthropology of Christianity, youth and gender. Ben Rogaly is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sussex, UK. His current research focuses on class, community, migration, and ethnicity in British provincial cities.