Cathedrals, Dinosaurs, and Puzzling Publics

Join us for this year's Annual Jackman Lecture in the Humanities with Simon Coleman, Chancellor Henry N.R. Jackman University Professor of Religion. The Annual Jackman Lecture in the Humanities was inaugurated in 2022-23 on the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the Jackman Humanities Institute as a way to express our lasting gratitude for the support of the Honourable Henry N.R. Jackman for research in the humanities. This annual lecture features a leading humanist at the University of Toronto.

The idea that the Euro-American world is becoming straightforwardly secular no longer holds much sway among scholars of religion, but many conventional locations of worship are emptying out. This trend is particularly evident across Christian landscapes, where decommissioned churches are becoming prime targets for conversion into condos and cafés. Larger cathedrals, though, are bucking the trend, and the numbers of visitors can be extraordinary. A 2012 report claimed that over a quarter of the resident adult population of England had gone to a Church of England cathedral at least once in the previous 12 months—an impressive turnaround from the situation in the 1970s when these buildings had been condemned (including by some clergy) as ‘dinosaurs, large and useless’ (Davie 2012: 486). Drawing on work I’ve carried out on four cathedrals in England, I ask what such visits might tell us about clerical constructions of, and lay engagements with, ‘public’ religion in a society where people supposedly don’t go to church. Going beyond default framings provided by studies of heritage and tourism, I’ll invite you to pore over the suggestive semiotics of ecclesiastical statistics; to consider the subtle biopolitics of hosting diverse publics in urban Christian spaces; but, above all, to reflect on the significance of multiple ritual engagements that seem so trivial they are usually ignored by clergy and scholars alike. 

Tickets are free, but we do ask that you register.