Changing nature of sacred spaces
Congregational membership in the United States is slowly declining. Data from the General Social Survey show that 17 percent of Americans attended a religious gathering weekly in the 1990s. By 2010, this number had dropped to 11 percent.
These changes spark new questions about how people’s personal religious and spiritual beliefs are changing. They also raise questions about where, if at all, people experience the sacred.
With architectural historian Alice Friedman and photographer Randall Armor, I located and documented more than 50 hidden sacred spaces in the greater Boston area alone.
Tucked around the edges in Boston – in hospital chapels, meditation rooms in universities, and prayer rooms in airports, nursing homes and a range of other institutions — these spaces are open to the public.
Initial glimpses
While conducting research for a book about religion and spirituality in health care, I visited many hospital chapels, meditation and prayer rooms. I began a conversation with Alice and architect Karla Johnson, who built an interfaith space at Tufts, several years ago.
We hoped to photograph and share these
spaces with a broader audience as a next step in our conversation. Karla became ill and died in 2016, and Alice and I decided to continue these efforts in her memory. As a first step, photographer Randy Armor and I started driving around the city last summer photographing as many chapels, meditation and prayer rooms as we could find in institutions focused on things other than religion and spirituality. In the past nine months we have located close to 80 such spaces and photographed just over 50.
Even as congregations decline, we learned,
chapels, meditation and prayer rooms remain, and people are eager to talk with us about them.
Evolving over time
We found these spaces in hospitals, nursing homes, colleges and universities, the port, the airport, public parks, malls, state prisons, cemeteries and even a local museum.
Some are standalone, while others are a part of larger buildings. Some were designed by well-known architects, while others were created informally by people desiring a small retreat.
The chapel at MIT, for example, was designed in 1955 by prominent architect Eero Saarinen and paired with his famous Kresge Auditorium nearby, intended to meet the religious and spiritual needs of everyone on the MIT campus. A small prayer space at the New England Seafarers Mission in the port, in contrast, has been moved and changed several times. Today it consists of a cushion for someone in a kneeling position, behind a movable screen under a tapestry of the Last Supper.
While some of the spaces we found look much as they did when constructed, others have evolved over time to accommodate people from a range of religious traditions.
At Brandeis University, for example, the original chapels were built in the early 1950s for Protestants, Catholics and Jews. Today there are spaces for Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and other students in various areas across campus.
At Northeastern University, a sacred space, a reflection room and an area for ablution, private prayer and meditation were literally built on the ashes of the university’s tradition Bacon Memorial Chapel, which burned in the 1990s. Designed by architects Monica Ponce de Leon and Nader Tehrani and opened in 1998, the area was designed to be flexible and accessible to multiple religious practitioners.