Religion and Religious Places: Rethinking Hybridity

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06

The oratorio is a Nineteenth Century religious place molded as a center and a school for the young troublesome working class boys and young men of Turin, the capital city of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which occupied what today is the Italian Piedmont. The main promoter of the oratorio was a priest named Don Bosco. Within the walls the oratorio, Don Bosco molded the Salesians, a religious institution shaped by Don Bosco’s pedagogical project: turning the brats of the city of Turin into little angels via the oratorio. The thesis explores the story of the oratorio, the Salesians and Don Bosco’s pedagogical discourse as a way to criticize the core theoretical frame of postsecular geography, the understanding that “the religious” influences secular societies, which paradoxically reinforces the idea that religion is somehow an independent variable untouched by “the secular”. Instead, what I claim is that “the religious” itself is a hybrid religious/secular entity. Religious places, religious institutions and religious discourses are shaped by political, social and economic issues: “the secular” and “the religious” are co-produced.