Blog Post

by Samuel Huard

As an enterprise for which universality is a fundamental and continuous project, the Catholic Church has continuously expanded its presence across the world. Religious orders played – and still play – an active role in this entangling of worlds. As their members crossed borders, these orders became spaces of domination and emancipation, of ethnocentric impositions and intercultural encounters, of violence and love. They became spaces both for the reproduction of the world’s social injustices and for the creation of concrete utopias. Today, as the Catholic Church’s center of gravity is moving from the North towards the South, at least demographically, these tensions create new challenges and opportunities. [Read more…] about Sisterliness and Coloniality

by Valeria Vergani

On October 30^th, 2020, the Holy Infrastructures Reading Group met to discuss the interplay of two theoretical essays framed around issues of economy, sovereignty, and sociality through the nexus of material religion. The first piece, “The Doctrine of the Image and Icon,” is a book chapter contained in Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary and authored by philosopher and art historian Marie-José Mondzain. [Read more…] about Icon and Fetish at the Intersection of Imperial Economies

by Valeria Vergani

Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto, September 19^th & September 20^th, 2019

This two-day workshop, titled “Soil, Space and Place: Sacralizing New Nationalisms and Sense of Belonging” brought together international scholars from many disciplines—including anthropology, theology, religious studies, sociology, geography, and Latinx studies— around the themes of soil, space, and the sacred. Soil is entangled with new and old forms of sovereignty; but also space and place, land, territory, property, and possession, which buttress settler colonialism. Considered through a theopolitical lens, soil enriches understandings of how place is never simply “land” under legal and governmental jurisdiction, but rather is complex and always-already influenced by historical and present forms of sacralization. [Read more…] about Soil, Space and Place: Sacralizing New Nationalisms and Sense of Belonging

by Sophia Jaworski

Alumni Hall, Victoria College, University of Toronto, January 17^th & 18^th, 2019

The Connaught Initiative, Entangled Worlds: Sovereignty, Sanctities and Soil emerged from an ethnographic moment, an emplacement in Toronto’s landscape, wherein which a whole set of spiritual devotees were mobilized by the conjoining of the relic of the arm of St. Francis Xavier with the language of theodicy, warding off evil in the Church. This expression bore vast political implications as the Cardinal preached from the pulpit of Toronto’s Cathedral, thereby sparking the themes of this Initiative (see previous blog post) and the very topic of the Connaught’s first research workshop. [Read more…] about Expressions of Sacred Legitimacy and their Political Implications

by Connie Gagliardi

St. Michael’s Cathedral, Toronto, 2018

A large flock of devotees, many of Philippine and Asian origins, gather together in celebration for the touring relics of one of the founders of the Jesuits, Francis Xavier. Over the course of the evening and over the following days people line up in thousands to touch the case containing relics from the right arm of the saint. [Read more…] about Entangled Worlds, through the prism of the relic of St. Francis Xavier in Toronto