Clausén, Marie Sirke Elisabeth2026-02-122026-02-122026-02-12http://hdl.handle.net/10393/51373https://doi.org/10.20381/ruor-31745The United Kingdom can be said to be on the threshold of a post-Christian age. This poses an obvious and serious question about the fate of the 16,000 parish churches that have for so long played a central role – visually, socially, and philosophically – in our landscapes and communities. Many in the Church of England who view churches chiefly as venues for public worship would, as a result of decreasing attendance figures and increasing fabric maintenance costs, like to see the Church accelerate its divestment of churches. Meanwhile, other actors such as heritage funders tend to view them as historic buildings like any other. Redundant churches are sold, often for secular use, unless they can be vested with the Churches Conservation Trust, and churches at risk are often reordered to create ‘multi-use’ or ‘multi-purpose’ – i.e. secular – spaces, in the hope that this might help fund the fabric. This leaves churches between Scylla and Charybdis; that is, between those concerned primarily with the immaterial, relational aspects of religion and those whose sole focus is on the material. If we don’t attempt to find a middle ground between purely immaterial religious concerns and purely material heritage concerns, the category of sacred space may disappear altogether. That being so, it seems imperative to ask whether the immediate and more long-term survival of both the material and immaterial dimensions of churches might be better secured if we ask why we might want to preserve these particular edifices – what it is they might do for us that other edifices don’t – and that we also consider the possibility that 21st-century needs may in fact include existential spaces. After all, whether or not we subscribe to any particular religion, we remain existential beings, i.e. self-conscious beings aware of our own mortality, with a built-in capability – and predilection – for posing the metaphysical questions that an awareness of mortality invariably brings. Pursuant to which, statistics about British religiosity reveal that while the majority do not consider themselves religious or harbour any particular denominational beliefs, few call themselves atheists, many are rediscovering the art of pilgrimage, and most pray. Between the demise of organised religion and the continued existential needs of the non-religious lies a serious and thrilling possibility, as yet unexplored, of re-engagement with sacred architecture. I propose that our best chance of saving churches in a post-Christian – but also ostensibly post-secular – age lies in minding the gap bridged by an enduring need for transcendence. Although phenomenology is a leading approach among both theorists and practitioners in the field of architecture and has of late also made inroads among cultural heritage scholars, it remains oddly neglected among those managing and researching specifically religious heritage. Yet, I am convinced that it takes a phenomenological perspective to bring into focus the true reason for preserving historic churches and that the very lack of these perspectives is putting them at further risk. As the first large-scale phenomenological study of historic churches, this project explores whether we still need sacred spaces in the 21st century and what conceivable role churches could play in the approaching post-Christian era by apprehending and describing in what ways the 659 extant medieval churches of the Norfolk churchscape embody Martin Heidegger’s mythic-poetic concept of ‘dwelling.’ This concept enables a (re)consideration of the proper mode of perceiving and engaging with these churches as things not reducible either to a collection of art-historically notable buildings or as the defunct and costly relics of public worship spaces of a religion on the run. Instead, it grants a possibility for Mystery to prevail beyond religious dogmas, decrees, and denominations and allows for an imaginative retrieval of Norfolk’s churches as thinging, worlding things with the power of mobilising our slumbering disposition to see ourselves as being-in-the-world – in other words, as sacred.ensecularismpost-secularismSpiritual but not Religious (SBNR)nonessacred architecturehistoric churchesmaterial cultural heritagesacred heritageHeideggerDwellingGathering of the Fourfoldarchitectural phenomenologythe experience of architecturehuman habitatChurch of EnglandAnglican ecclesiologyNorfolk churcheschurch conservationparish churchessacred spaceThesis