Current Research Focus: Practicing Texts: Materializing the Study of Religious Texts and Textual Practices in Contemporary Religion
The project starts from the observation that popular religious products (e.g. TV programs, advice books, Apps) play an important role for religious practitioners in the acquisition of religious knowledge and its enactment in everyday life. It is not just authoritative scriptures in the narrow sense – the Bible, canonical Buddhist texts, or the Qur’an – that are crucial for the formation of religious subjects and worldviews. The project hypothesizes that religious actors acquire religious knowledge and shape their religious identity through active engagement with popular textual media related to authoritative religious sources. The project proposes a reconfiguration of the study of religious texts and text-related practices.
Moving beyond a narrow focus on scriptures, I propose the concept of the ‘scriptural field’ as a relational framework for an analysis of the interaction between popular and authoritative religious texts, related textual practices, and their role in forming religious subjects and notions of religious authority.
Instead of simply perceiving texts as reservoirs of semantic content accessed through disembodied acts of reading, the project employs a praxeological approach to integrate recent theoretical developments from material culture, lived religion, and cognitive science. As practices combine the cognitive and material dimensions of human activity, I conceptualize all textual practices – from the ritual handling of texts to reading and interpreting them – as embodied practices, which engage the material dimension of texts and the sensing body of religious practitioners.
Materializing Urban Religious Aspirations: New Creation Church and the Building of The Star Performing Arts Centre Singapore
Project during my Fellowship at KFG Research Group “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” (Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies (April - July 2024)
The project explores the intersection of religious place-making practices in urban contexts with material approaches, considering architecture, urban infrastructures, and zoning policies in Singapore. It focuses on a case study of The STAR Performing Arts Centre, originally a collaboration between CapitaLand Mall Asia and Rock Productions Pte Ltd, the business arm of New Creation Church (NCC). Opened in November 2012, The STAR is hailed as one of Singapore’s architectural gems. Officially designated as ‘secular,’ it functions as an integrated civic, cultural, retail, and entertainment hub, featuring shops, restaurants, and diverse halls for cultural performances. With a seating capacity of 5,000, The STAR now features the city’s largest high-end auditorium for concerts. It not only serves as NCC’s worship venue but is also seen by church members as a tangible manifestation of God’s favor on the church and the city.
Building The STAR served a dual purpose for NCC. First, it addressed the church’s growing need for a larger worship venue in the absence of a dedicated church building. Second, it aimed to materialize NCC’s urban religious aspirations for increased visibility and recognition within the tightly regulated cityscape of Singapore. The project delves into NCC’s practices of religious place-making within this highly regulated urban landscape. It analyzes how The STAR, as a social-material assemblage, embodies the church’s urban religious aspirations and how these aspirations intertwine with the secular, economic, and cosmopolitan goals of the various parties involved in the project.
The analysis will trace how the building becomes different things to different social/religious actors – a religious sanctuary to a church community, a stage for artists and their audiences, a commercial hub for investors and retailers, and an internationally recognized architectural gem in Singapore’s skyline. The project’s basic assumption is that differentiations between and demarcations of secular, public, commercial, and religious spaces – even in highly regulated settings such as Singapore – are instable, malleable, and situational and always in the process of becoming rather than being. The project will explore the notion of the urban as a framework in which buildings as social-material assemblages are entangled with religious, secular, commercial, touristic, political, etc. aspirations of city-dwellers.