Imaging Sacred Space

A selected group of students at Sherubtse College, located in eastern Bhutan, and the members of the fall, 2005 senior seminar in religion at Wheaton College, were challenged to produce a digital image that captured "sacred space" in any of its various manifestations, e.g. in religious architecture, in ritual activity and in nature, and to write a short narrative explaining the image and how it manifests the "sacred."

All of the images and narratives are posted on this website. Senior seminar students read and discussed Mircea Eliade's analysis of sacred space in his classic work, The Sacred and the Profane, and both groups viewed the film "Baraka," a remarkable effort exploring the sacred and the profane in nature and in culture via an array of locales spanning the globe.

Students on both sides of the planet have much to learn from each other with regard to how space is conceptualized as sacred. What happens to a culture when space becomes viewed as exclusively profane, as a means to an end? A recent news story in Bhutan's national newspaper, Kuensel, titled "In Come the Billboards" shows the country's first large outdoor advertisement featuring a Bhutanese man in traditional dress, engaging in the Bhutanese national sport, archery, while enjoying Indian beer. In the recent past the largest outdoor images in Bhutan were cliff paintings, and huge cloth appliqués, called thondrol, displayed at annual religious dance festivals, depicting Padmasambhava, the patriarch of Bhutanese Buddhism. Will the advent of billboard culture in Bhutan displace or diminish the potency of traditional, religious mass media?