Anthology published: "Sacredness in Transition" asks questions about religious buildings in Germany.

How do urban spaces actually change when the society that shapes these cities becomes more religiously plural and diverse? What happens to churches that are empty on Sundays due to an increasing number of people leaving the church? How do Jewish, Muslim and free church communities find their own plots of land or their own premises for their religious practice? And how are such new building, conversion and demolition processes negotiated communicatively within society?

In the anthology "Sacrality in Transition: Religious Buildings in the Urban Space of the 21st Century in Germany", which was recently published by JOVIS Verlag in Berlin, the editors PD Dr. Beate Löffler and Dunja Sharbat Dar asked these questions. The anthology publishes the results of a three-year DFG-funded research project, which was carried out as a cooperation between the Faculty of Architectural History and Theory at the TU Dortmund and CERES. Under the project management of Prof. Wolfgang Sonne (TU Dortmund) and Volkhard Krech (CERES, RUB), PD Dr. Beate Loeffler, Dr. Kim de Wildt, Dr. Martin Radermacher and Dunja Sharbat Dar examined the transformations of religiously used buildings in Germany. With a focus on the three monotheistic religions Islam, Judaism and Christianity, the research team considered the period from 1990 to the present.

The anthology "Sacredness in Transition: Religious Buildings in the Urban Space of the 21st Century in Germany" is now available in German from Jovis Verlag and is also available as an open source download free of charge. On the project website you can also use the quantitative data collection in the form of a database free of charge. If you know of other buildings that you would like us to include in the database, please let us know here.