02/07/2026 09:00 - 17:10

HALL: Pola - A108

Contact: Lens K.

Chair: Goyvaerts S., Jordan K., Lens K.

Across Europe, profound religious and ritual transformations are reshaping the landscapes of worship and community life. Churches, monasteries, and other sacred sites are increasingly confronted with questions of continuity and change: some are adapted for new liturgical practices, others are shared between different communities and users, and many are repurposed for secular or hybrid functions. At the same time, repurposed and multi-use religious buildings raise questions about how people and communities inhabit and share sacred environments. Adaptive reuse is often celebrated as cultural resilience: saving buildings from vacancy and decay, while opening them to new forms of meaning. Yet each intervention also entails loss: of ritual coherence, of symbolic depth, of the intangible "spirit of place." How can we acknowledge both sides of this dynamic? How is 'loss' or absence spatially expressed? Is there such a thing as a neutral shared space, and how far can adaptation and reuse go before too much is surrendered?
This panel invites religious studies scholars, architects, sociologists, theologians, liturgists, and artists to reflect on these tensions. We welcome contributions that explore the delicate balance between preservation and transformation, heritage and innovation, memory and forgetting. Case studies may address contemporary design responses to shifting worship practices, including the rise of Pentecostalism and the emergence of quasi-Christian spaces blending wellness and alternative spiritualities. Papers can also investigate historical repurposing or sharing of religious spaces, demolished or memorial spaces, or rather focus on architectural styles and experiments with minimalism and emptiness, highlighting how spaces negotiate the move from the religious to the spiritual.
The conveners will also inquire into possibilities of academically publishing (a selection of) submitted papers.