A global sense of religious place: the production of religious and spiritual sites through local–global entanglements and global mobilities

ABSTRACT

Places of worship in the Christian tradition are often considered to retain fixed and static identities. However, circuits of globalization and global mobilities are increasingly present within such sites and drawn upon to construct new forms of place and geographies filtered through the individual church’s channels of mobilities. Following on from the new mobilities paradigm and relational approaches to ‘place’, this paper explores how the global and the local become implicated in places of worship. Using participant-observation and diary-interview methods based in Baptist churches in Bristol, UK, and framing the findings through Urry’s framework (Mobilities, Cambridge: Polity, 2007), the research examines the multiple interdependent mobilities of imaginary travel, communication, virtual travel, and corporeal travel. Whilst global mobilities were present within the sites, locality and local mobilities also featured prominently. The combination of interdependent mobilities, produced unique place identities in each of church that engaged with the global yet retained local circuits and community identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Geographies of religion
• globalization and religion
• mobilities
• sacred mobilities
• religion and place

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the peer reviewers and other colleagues for their helpful and constructive feedback. All of whom have helped to improve this work considerably.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edward Wigley

Notes on contributor

Edward Wigley completed his PhD in social and cultural geography at the University of the West England, Bristol, UK. He is currently a Post-Doctoral Research Associate on the ESRC-funded project Smart Cities in the Making: Learning from Milton Keynes based at the Open University, UK. Recent journal contributions have been published in Social and Cultural Geography (2017; 2017) and Mobilities (2017).