Concept
Place of worship
Overview
A place of worship is a specially designed structure or space where individuals or a group of people such as a congregation come to perform acts of devotion, veneration, or religious study. A building constructed or used for this purpose is sometimes called a house of worship. Temples, churches, mosques, and synagogues are main examples of structures created for worship. A monastery may serve both to house those belonging to religious orders and as a place of worship for visitors. Natural or topographical features may also serve as places of worship, and are considered holy or sacrosanct in some religions; the rituals associated with the Ganges river are an example in Hinduism.
Under international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions, religious buildings are offered special protection, similar to the protection guaranteed hospitals displaying the Red Cross or Red Crescent. These international laws of war bar firing upon or from a religious building.
Religious architecture expresses the religious beliefs, aesthetic choices, and economic and technological capacity of those who create or adapt it, and thus places of worship show great variety depending on time and place.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The place of worship is far more suitable to the humility of the saint who retired thither, than are the splendid festivities which have been instituted in honour of her total renunciation of the world. And perhaps the whole of Christendom, which now, for eighteen hundred years, has based its riches, pomps, and festival amusements, on the memory of its first founders and most zealous confessors, cannot point out a…
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters from Switzerland and Travels in Italy
States what Place of worship is; opens on Place of worship.
But by sacred things one must not understand simply those personal beings which are called gods or spirits; a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word, anything can be sacred. A rite can have this character; in fact, the rite does not exist which does not have it to a certain degree.
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
States what Place of worship is.
Sacred What And the word Profane, is usually taken in the Scripture for the same with Common; and consequently their contraries, Holy, and Proper, in the Kingdome of God must be the same also. But figuratively, those men also are called Holy, that led such godly lives, as if they had forsaken all worldly designes, and wholly devoted, and given themselves to God. In the proper sense, that which is made Holy by Gods…
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
States what Place of worship is.
Related ideas
- Eastern Orthodox Church
- Anglicanism
- Hinduism
- Ancient Greek
- Judaism
- Jainism
- Jerusalem
- Karma
- Christians
- Polytheism
- Muslims
- Religion in ancient Rome
- Geneva Conventions
- Protestantism
- Jews
- Orthodoxy
- Sikhism
- Shinto
- Tenochtitlan
- Taoism
- Mandaeism
- Vatican City
- Buddhism
- Cambodia
Place in the tradition
Part of Religious humanism.