Between 1712 and 1715, the Convocation of the Church of England attempted to replace the existing informal orders used for the consecration of churches, chapels, and churchyards with a single uniform rite. While these efforts have been associated with the erection of the Fifty New Churches to provide for the populous and expanding suburbs of London and Westminster, the discussions actually arose out of the political divisions between the bishops and the Lower House of Convocation. The efforts to establish an official order of consecration was also a response to the changed ecclesiastical climate that followed the Toleration Act of 1689, which allowed for the registration of Dissenter chapels. The Established Church found its religious hegemony threatened and the particular status of its places of worship, achieved through consecration, challenged. The church responded to the criticism of their existing forms of consecration by reforming the liturgy as well as demonstrating the historical and legal basis for the practice. The sermons preached at the consecration or reopening of these churches provided a further opportunity for the clergy to justify the ceremony as well as to draw comparisons between these churches and Dissenting meetinghouses.

This paper explores the cultural politics of lineage landscapes in contemporary rural China. Drawing on a combined governmentality/translation approach and ethnographic fieldwork in rural Wenzhou, it examines how the state governs the production of lineage landscapes and how local lineages translate governmental technologies in complex ways. Empirical evidence reveals that the government develops diversified rationalities and modes of governance to direct the (re)construction of lineage landscapes. It is also found that local lineages are skilled at appropriating state discourses and practices as well as enrolling other (non-)human actors, thereby legitimizing their landscape projects of ancestral tombs and memorials. On the ground, they often displace state objectives with the production of their preferred landscape (for example, “chair” tombs). Respectful of ancestors, state agents sometimes turn a blind eye to local displacement; however, while encountering challenges from the higher-level government, they intensify regulation, but lineages still retain the capacity to negotiate with them. With sensitivity to the entanglement of diversified actors and their dynamic interactions, this paper underlines the multiplicity and contingency of state governance and societal responses. It also foregrounds the cultural politics of lineage landscapes as a process of translating governmental technologies characterized by continuous mobilization, displacement and negotiation in a heterogeneous network.

It is a privilege to have been invited to deliver the Boydell Lecture and to record my own appreciation of Peter, whom I can picture now – immaculate and affable as always. He was very kind to me as a fledgling Bishop of London. There was at the time an understandable debate about whether the tradition of inviting the bishop to be an honorary bencher of the Middle Temple should be continued. Time pressures had made the connection of some previous bishops very tenuous. Peter argued that +Londin should be given a last chance and this has led as far as I am concerned to a most nourishing and instructive relationship with the Temple and those who work here. As you know, by the Queen's command I do not appear in the Temple Church as bishop but as Dean of HM Chapels Royal and the Visitor, and I relish my connection with a place which preserves memories of so many events which have shaped our nation, as well as a living choral tradition which must be among the finest in the land.

This article offers a cultural approach to Murid migration to eastern Bawol. It argues that Murid settlement of eastern Bawol was part of an effort to transform the land then under French colonial domination into daar al Islam (house of Islam) or daara al Murid (house of the Murids). This endeavor to create Murid sacred space in Bawol was a conscious effort undertaken by sheikhs and disciples under the leadership of Amadu Bamba. The process of building daar al Murid unfolded in three empirically overlapping but analytically distinguishable steps: first, physical occupation of the space; second, its investment with religious meanings; and third, the containment of French cultural influences.