In ‘Sacred Stuff,’ students explore religion through material culture

It was an impassioned vision: conjoined dormitories where a covey of university students could live, work, study, and socialize. Inspired by Oxford's hallowed grounds, the University of Pennsylvania's Quadrangleis a classic example of collegiate gothic architecture and an object of study for the course Sacred Stuff: Religious Bodies, Places, and Objects.

Now a Penn Global Seminar, the spring course included a travel component in May: 10 days in Oxford and London touring buildings, monuments, campuses, and churches. But, first, students spent a semester reading and looking at art and architecture, including the Quad, an example of how college campuses came to mimic houses of worship beginning in the late 19th century.

Donovan Schaefer, associate professor of religious studies, has been teaching the course since 2018. "I've always been very interested in how religion works, how it shapes our motivation in the world," he says. "We tend to conceptualize religion as belief. We spend too much time thinking about the intellectual side of religion and not enough thinking about the emotional side of religion as what really gives religion its substance."

Sacred Stuff explores religion in the material world through interaction with spaces, artifacts, bodies, monuments, color, design, architecture, and film, reading classical and contemporary theories of how religion relates to things. Sensory experience-what a person can smell, see, and touch-influences their perception of the world, some theorists argue.

Nora Wang, a rising fourth-year student from Nashville, Tennessee, is an anthropology major minoring in music and journalistic writing. "One of the things that really got me interested in this course was the material connection," Wang says. The course is cross-listed in anthropology, and she found connections between the idea of material religion and the study of cultures.

Arriving in England, Wang was most excited to visit Stonehenge. The class had studied the site's background and the mystery surrounding the oblong monuments. During that visit, they saw people taking selfies at the iconic location along with druids conducting a ceremony, a juxtaposition of the secular with the sacred.

"It was very interesting for me to see how something that one person might consider a tourist destination is something that is sacred to someone else," Wang says. "That moment tied a lot of things from the class together."

At Stonehenge were two extremes, says Uchi Murima, a rising third-year student from Kilifi, Kenya, studying cognitive science and computer science, two very different groups of people relating in very different ways to the same thing. On one hand the druids, who proceeded in wearing colorful clothes and set up a drum circle to conduct a ritual, she says. "They believe in something that the stones can do, in some meaning that they've attached to the stones."

On the other hand, there were the tourists, "people making all sorts of photos with the stones, trying to get certain angles or photos," Murima says. "All that they want to see is just the marvel of Stonehenge.

"One group is praying, and the other group is just taking photos, funny poses," she says, noting that it could be argued that the tourists desecrate the space by not offering proper respect. "That was an interesting thing to observe in person," she says.

Makenzie Kerneckel says Stonehenge "felt more touristy. Not that I didn't enjoy it," she says, "but I enjoyed other things more."

For Kerneckel, a rising junior from Houston majoring in political science with a minor in survey research and data analytics, the most interesting site was St. Mary the Virgin Churchin Iffley Village, off the London tourist trail and a 30-minute walk from Oxford. Built by the Normans around 1160, the church has a simple, stone façade with Romanesque rounded arches shaded by an even older yew tree.

The tree mostly likely predated the church and marked it as a sacred site before the arrival of Christianity in Britain, Kerneckel says. Yew was important to the druids, as its properties (poisonous bark and rapid regeneration) were associated, like Christ, with death and rebirth.

The class had a tour given by an older couple who attend church services every Sunday. "That was my favorite experience," Kerneckel says. "It just felt very grounding, and it felt like I was entering a sacred space that is still used to this day."

Schaefer, who has taught Sacred Stuff five times-its next iteration will be in 2026-first conceived of the course while living and working in England. There, religion has a palpable tradition in material culture, he says. "When you're in the U.K., you can see it in church architecture; you can see it in liturgy."

On the trip, Schaefer arranged for a walking tour to look at churches built by Christopher Wren. Born in 1632, Wren enjoyed a long and prolific life, building 52 churches after the Great Fire of London in 1666, with St. Paul's Cathedral as his masterpiece. When designing a space for worship, Wren emphasized the word of God, Schaefer says. "A lot of these churches in London were set up as sound boxes, so anywhere you were sitting in the church, you could hear what the preacher was saying," Schaefer says.

It was an opportunity for the students to see how architectural decisions followed theological decisions, he says, and to compare that vision to Oxford, where the class toured Anglo-Catholic sites. Following the Catholic tradition, those churches are visually and olfactorily stimulating, with the smell of incense along with a lot of color including stained glass depicting the saints and the life of Jesus.

The Penn Global travel component fit in with the central tenant of Sacred Stuff, Schaefer says. "You can teach, and you can read, and you can explore, and you can even look at pictures of things, but you are missing something if you're not physically present for the thing that you're studying, if you're not physically present for the space itself, for the object itself, for the experience itself.

"That was really borne out by the process of going through the trip," he says. "The students powerfully resonated with having done a lot of the background reading and having prepared themselves to think about these things in a very rich and detailed way but then actually physically, bodily encountering these places that we'd read about: these churches, these colleges, Stonehenge. I think it was clear to them what was missing when we were just studying it from our classroom in Philadelphia."

"The travel component was really a fulfillment of that idea of the felt life of belief," Kerneckel says. "We went to the spaces, and we could actually feel the ideas that we were studying because those ideas are inherently felt; they are not things that can really be understood by reading."

"We'd done all the work," Wang says. "Now was time to experience those emotions and get the experience you can only get by putting yourself in a place."

One concept they studied was collective effervescence, Kerneckel says, "which is a fancy term for the kind of sacred feeling you get when you're in a crowd of people." It's a shared moment with others-whether in a temple, a football stadium, or at a Taylor Swift concert-that unifies a group, the collective high of everyone all feeling the same feelings all at the same time.

The class observed the lived religious experience, Kerneckel says, seeing worship practice, people on pilgrimage, and the druids drumming at Stonehenge. And, in the true spirit of collective effervescence, they experienced this together.