Review: <i>Urban Religious Events: Public Spirituality in Contested Spaces</i>, edited by Paul Bramadat, Mar Griera, Marian Burchardt, and Julia Martínez-Ariño

Urban Religious Events provides a rich selection of case studies on how diverse religious groups around the world are increasingly using cities as “the sites for the production and performance of innovative religious forms” (1). Arguing against the assumption that urban spaces ineluctably foster secularity, the authors of these essays assert that the opposite is true, and that “more and more religious groups are taking religion to the streets in an attempt to defend or challenge existing definitions of public space” (1). As the editors state in the introduction, the key theoretical concept of the book is the “eventization” of religion, that is, the transformation of a traditional religious ritual into an open-air spectacle with enough emotional and aesthetic power to appeal to multiple audiences, both religious and secular. Such urban religious events, the editors contend, represent a new form of religious practice that has the potential to alter fundamentally the relationship between religion and urbanity in modern secular democracies.In Part One, “After the Secular City,” the first three essays document the tensions that arise when secular and religious forces compete for the control of certain urban spaces. For example, in Ajusca, a religiously plural neighborhood of Mexico City, a large boulder has become the focus of struggle between Catholics who have long seen it as a natural shrine to the Virgen of Guadalupe and more secular minded residents who have converted it into a heritage site dedicated to Ajusca’s founders. Likewise, in Pushkinskaya Square in Moscow, Russian Orthodox groups have long sought to recover the space, which was once the location of a monastery before its destruction by the Soviets. For more secular Muscovites, however, the Orthodox groups’ highly public activism is unwelcome, as they cherish the square’s association with Russian culture as represented by a statue of the writer Pushkin and an important national theater. A final example shows a more successful accommodation of the sacred with the secular in two major eco-festivals in the Swiss cities of Lausanne and Geneva. Here, purveyors of “hard” secular environmentalism coexist with those of ecospirituality, although the price of this toleration has been the toning down of “dark green religion” to a less militant form, which the authors call “subtle green spirituality” (32). The fourth essay of this section develops a typology of religious festivals in Italy, highlighting the “complex and contradictory dynamics and sacralization that are at play” (68), leading to an ironic situation in which “festivals of religions legitimize religions in cities while at the same time reaffirming the secular nature of the urban arena” (76).The second part, “The Politics of Religion in Urban Spaces,” treats four case studies of urban religious events that have engendered significant controversies that necessitated management by secular authorities—the failed attempt to celebrate the International Day of Yoga in Vancouver, British Columbia; the public celebration of the Jewish festivals of Sukkot and Hanukkah in Barcelona; the ongoing struggles for Muslim control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem; and three events in Madrid that pitted conservative Catholics against secularizing trends in that city. It is the two essays dealing with Spain that explicitly use the theoretical framework of “eventization.” The essay on Madrid is particularly interesting in this regard, since the author clearly illustrates “eventization” by analyzing conservative Catholics’ use of “strategic secularism” (129), that is, the refashioning of traditional sacred symbols in order to re-enchant urban space in ways designed to appeal to the sensibilities of more secular Madrileños.Embodiment is the key category of three of the four essays that comprise the third part, “Public Religious Events, Urban Transcendence, and Embodied Spirituality.” These are case studies of meditation flash mobs in Barcelona, evangelical Brazilian jiu-jitsu in Rio de Janeiro, and Sufis in Berlin, all of which highlight the ways in which the collective effervescence generated by public ritual is used to contest the secularity of urban spaces. Surprisingly, the fourth essay, which concerns the 2011 visit of Pope Benedict to Berlin, focuses not on embodiment, but on the use of social media to create an event whose international impact was achieved precisely by ignoring the city in which it was staged—perhaps this is the “urban transcendence” mentioned in the section title. The volume ends with a brief epilogue that reiterates some of the essays’ major themes and suggests new ones.Urban Religious Events does make its case that novel religious practices are appearing with increasing frequency in many major cities, although the evidence is equivocal about how effective these practices will be in combatting urban secularity in the long run. Moreover, while the essays are theoretically far ranging and, in some cases, innovative, I do think the volume would have been more coherent and the essays more comparable if, as promised in the introduction, the concept of “eventization” had been applied uniformly throughout. Nevertheless, each of these essays is a worthy contribution to the sociology of religion in urban environments, and each would make an excellent individual reading for graduate seminars on this topic.

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