The Art of Community: Taking Place
Join us as we welcome Katie Hladky-Grant this week, for a practical and academic look at how human beings create sacred spaces, the purposes those spaces serve, and why they matter so much for meaning and connection.
MEET KATIE
Katie Hladky-Grant (she/her) is the President of Camp Quest, a network of secular summer camps grounded in humanist values. She holds a PhD in Religion and has been a secular humanist activist for 25 years. Katie lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and has ten foster and adopted kids.
Coming soon… Watch the Gathering here
READINGS
“In a general way, it is unquestionable that a society has all that is necessary to arouse the sensation of the divine in minds, merely by the power that it has over them; for to its members it is what a god is to his worshippers.”
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), bk. 2, ch. 7
Ritual is, first and foremost, a mode of paying attention. It is a process for marking interest. It is the recognition of this fundamental characteristic of ritual that most sharply distinguishes our understanding from that of the Reformers, with their all too easy equation of ritual with blind and thoughtless habit. It is this characteristic, as well, that explains the role of place as a fundamental component of ritual: place directs attention.”
Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (University of Chicago Press, 1987), 103