What's New

In a far northern country with very short winter days, Danes do what they can to overcome the darkness of winter with light and warmth. In Denmark the connection between Christmas and winter solstice seems especially strong. Christmas season begins in a small way at schools with Luciadag, (St. Lucy’s Day) on December 13. Lucia means “light,” and in pre-Reformation Denmark, St. Lucy’s feast was tied to the winter solstice and the beginning of the return of light to the world.1 1The feast has ancient roots in Denmark, but was imported to Denmark churches in 1944 as an act of light and hope

Given the minimal role of saints in Danish religious culture, feasts are not a major aspect of Danish religious life, except at Christmas and Easter. The national holiday calendar looks very Christian, including two days at Christmas, four for Holy Week and Easter, Ascension Thursday, and two days for Pentecost. Even then, Danish holiday practices in the broader culture are “best understood as secular traditions with religious trappings.”1 1Phil Zuckerman, "Introduction," in Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment, ( New York: New York UP, 2008), 10

Danes put a strong focus on supporting family and equal rights, and matters between couples stay between the sheets.

While Danish parents empower their children to make their own religious choices, confirmation remains a popular cultural rite.

Visually, the Chilean cultural landscape is full of conflicting signals about the place of Catholicism today. Animitas and shrines dot the landscape, but churches and personal religious style are understated.

Chile is home to a significant number of “official” pilgrimage and devotional sites and also to informal roadside shrines, marking Chile in public ways as a Catholic place.

Before Lent, Catholics in Limache, Chile celebrate the Feast of the Virgin of the 40 Hours with Masses, a fair, and a procession of the Virgin to the city prison for a touching exchange of prayers, songs and gifts among the clergy, community and incarcerated.

Animitas, roadside shrines to the dead, line the roads from desert north to the rainy south of Chile, numbering in the tens of thousands, especially along rural highways and in poor and working-class areas of small cities and towns.

In southern Kerala's seaside villages, religion is an all-encompassing part of life. Most of the parish-centered religious life in these towns takes place in the dark hours, before and after the heat of day. The early morning is punctuated not only by the sound of roosters, but also the sound of singing from various churches.

Though a minority religion, Catholicism has ancient and deep roots in the southern Indian state of Kerala, home to more than 33 million people. Kerala is the heartland for two Syrian-rite Catholic Churches, the Syro-Malabar and the Syro-Malankara Churches, and is home to a large Latin-rite Catholic population. In 2011, according to the Kerala census, Christians constituted 18% of the population, a much higher ratio than is true for India as a whole.1 1K. C. Zachariah, " The Syrian Christians of Kerala: Demographic and Socioeconomic Transition in the Twentieth Century," (working paper, Center